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ESSAYS OF TO-DAY. 



WOEKS BY THE SAllE ArifiOE. 



LITTLE AND WLSE ; or, Ser- 
mons to Children. Illustrated. i6mo, 
cloth, 357 pages. Price 31.25. 

THE WICKET GATE; or. 

Sermons to Children. Illustrated. 
lomo, cloth, 346 pages. Price Si. 25. 

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Essays of To-day 



iRelisious; anO CI)eologicaL 



BY 



WM. WILBERFORCE NEWTON, 

RECTOR OF ST. PAUl's CHURCH, BOSTON. 



"Credo ut intelligam." — Anselm. 

" Non credendum nisi prius intellectum. " — Abelard. 



r 



Vc7...7oo..qX.. 

'>^ 1879. 



BOSTON: 

A WILLIAMS & CO. 

1879. 






Copyright^ i879> 
By a. Williams & Co. 



Cambridge: 
Press of John Wilson & Son. 



PREFACE. 



"I CONFESS to a fondness for books of this kind [essays]. 
In the first place, we can throw down the volume after a 
score of pages ; begin at the end or in the middle : we can 
treat it like a newspaper. In the second place, it is miscel- 
laneous ; in turning over a page we pass from the Renais- 
sance to the nineteenth century, from England to India : 
this diversity surprises and pleases. Lastly, involuntarily 
the author is indiscreet ; he displays himself to us : it is a 

familiar conversation." 

Taine. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

I. The Limits of Enthusiasm i 

II. The Age of the Schoolmen 30 

III. Savonarola 61 

IV. Edward Irving 80 

V. Lacordaire 108 

VI. Representative Men of the English Church . 133 

VII. The Levitical Illustration of the Doctrine of 

THE Atonement 149 

VIII. Measuring Lines 164 

IX. The Present Day Elements in Christianity . . 178 

X. Causes of Heresy 192 

XL The Narrowness of Breadth 206 

XII. Original Sin 227 



ESSAYS OF TO-DAY. 



I. 

THE LIMITS OF ENTHUSIASM. 

TT is a saying of the Duke of Argyll, that " it seems 
almost a law, that no utterance of original genius can 
long escape the fate of being travestied and turned to non- 
sense by those who take it up second-hand." 

Within the human mind there are manifold tendencies 
to distort and darken that which is in itself originally pure 
and simple. The moods and vagaries, the prejudices and 
customs, the play of temperament, and the innate seeds of 
charlatanism, found in human nature, alike combine to 
weaken, falsify, and satirize those very qualities and graces 
which in themselves are so praiseworthy and real. In 
historic movements and in human characters, elements 
of strength, and capacities for the achievement of great re- 
sults, are at times unexpectedly flawed by the appearance 
of hidden and unforeseen agencies, which come to the light 
for criticism, in the form of an over-development or an ab- 
normal development of the inner working principles. It is 
the demon of excess which in so many cases causes all this 
trouble. It turns wisdom into foolishness, liberty into 



Essays of To-Day, 



license, human love into animal passion, earnest struggle 
into riot, and the noblest form of high enthusiasm into the 
mob-rule whimsicalities of fanaticism. It is concerning this 
latter phase of perverted power I wish to speak in this 
paper, which I have called the Limits of Enthusiasm. 

"Even our failures are a prophecy; 
Even our yearnings . . . 
After that fair and true we cannot grasp." 

This wildness of enthusiasm, this frenzied fanaticism in 
human nature, shows itself in every race at critical epochs 
in the history of the race, and at notable turning-points in 
the history of nations. We see it in the civil wars of Is- 
rael's disputed monarchy, and in the internal strifes which 
hurried on the destruction of Jerusalem ; in the civil dis- 
sensions of Rome, with those mooted questions of politi- 
cal economy whose dire threatenings have settled down 
to be the chronic curse of all later governments ; in the 
class-warfare of Italy at the period of the Renaissance ; in 
the sheet-lightning glare of Socialism as it flashed over the 
face of Europe in 1848; in the Reign of Terror in Francd* 
at the period of the Revolution ; and conspicuously in the 
religious development of Germany and England in the 
events which followed the Reformation. 

There is to every deeply earnest movement, and espe- 
cially to every religious movement, which contains the two- 
fold element of sacredness and power, a secret or exalted 
meaning concealed within it, to which it can never succeed 
in giving complete expression or utterance. 

There is an inner, dim, mysterious shrine — a vague, in- 
definite, holy place — in every hagiocracy, into which the 



The Limits of EntJuLsiasm. 3 

stranger entereth not, and with which the devotee is hke- 
wise strangely unfamiHar. There may be definiteness 
enough among the outer bulwarks of the enthusiasm ; but 
the inner citadel is a visionary apocalyptical tower, reach- 
ing up, in some vague way, among the clouds to heaven. 

One cannot read the Evangelists, and see how con- 
tinually our Lord was coming into contact with this 
peculiar spirit of the Jewish hierarchy, without discover- 
ing the unmistakable signs of the strength and the weak- 
ness of their natural and ecclesiastical enthusiasm. 

It is this theocratic enthusiasm, and its lawful limits, 
which is our present subject. Whether this spirit shows 
itself in the call of the Jewish prophet, or the rage of the 
later zealot ; whether the theocratic idea centres itself in 
the corporate Sanhedrim of the Jews, or the councils of 
the Christian Church, or the autocratic infaUibility of the 
Papacy of to-day ; whether the line of communication 
between heaven and earth is manifested by the visions of 
Savonarola, the revelations of Swedenborg, the illumina- 
tion of Irving, or by that unconscious belief in the reality 
of their discoveries which marked the characters of 
Mahomet in Arabia, and Joseph Smith, the founder of 
American Mahometanism in our own time, — the ruhng 
idea in all these cases is the same. It is a hicman monopoly 
of divine power ; it is the daimonian pythoness, the spirit of 
divination of the apostolic story, always bringing its master 
the ready gain. It is the intoxication of human nature, 
staggering under too heavy a load of inspiration, reeling 
to and fro under this excess of stimulus, and finally losing 
the balance and falling into the utter destruction of license. 



Essays of To-Day. 



These veiled prophets stand in their disputed niches all 
along the pathway of the world's history, and each succeed- 
ing age pulls at the veil to discover the secret of the 
draped face. And when the extremes of enthusiasm meet 
— as happens to-day — with faith colleges and faith cures, 
from the miraculous side of Protestantism, and the miracu- 
lous cures of Lourdes and Notre Dame de La Salette, and 
other pilgrim shrines in France, from the side of Roman- 
ism, — we are thrown back upon the first principle with 
which we started out : that this enthusiasm is an element 
common to us all, and that its excess, on its religious side, 
depends in an almost mathematical proportion upon the 
pressure of the inspiration upon a nature constitutionally 
and temperamentally ballasted or unballasted. 

Now, every man who has to deal with masses of men 
recognizes this fiery element in human nature, — this sym- 
pathetic contagion, — this epidemic of the momentary 
passionate likemindedness. This demonizing power, ap- 
pealing to the charlatan element which lies hidden in every 
one of us, is the secret cause of many a riotous outburst, 
and many an open war. It is an inspiration which pos- 
sesses almost the properties of an electric fluid ; it is in 
the very air ; it is stored up in human batteries which are 
surcharged with it, as gases are packed away in a retort. 
The subtle influence of the Alarseillaise Hymn, or " The 
Watch on the Rhine," shows us the lyric powxr of lofty 
music and lofty sentiment combined ; and reproduces, in 
veritable history, the fabled wonders Timotheus wrought 
in Dryden's ode : — 



TJie Limits of Ent/ncsiasin. 5 

"The princes applaud with a furious joy, 
And the king seized a flambeau with zeal to destroy ; 

Thais led the way 

To light him to his prey, 
And, like another Helen, fired another Troy." 

There are times when human nature does not seem able 
to bear its jDassions, — when it gives way under the pres- 
sure of its inspirations ; and it is on these occasions that 
we are able to mark out clearly the limits of enthusiasm, 
drawing for ourselves the line between that which is a 
trained power leading upwards, and that which is an un- 
licensed frenzy dragging every thing allied to it down- 
wards. 

At the period of the Reformation, when the stagnation 
of mental custom was broken up by unforeseen issues, — 
when past guiding habits of thought and of life were 
unexpectedly changed for new and unfamiliar ones, — men 
found themselves suddenly unyoked from the balancing 
shafts and harness of tradition and custom, and were left 
free to develop their own right of private judgment to the 
highest possible terms. 

The many fanatics and ultraists of this Reformation 
period, with their wild and visionary views, show us the 
difficulties the reformers had to encounter in separating 
from the old religious condition, and in establishing with 
line and plummet the boundary lines of the new era. 

As it happened that only at intervals any of the re- 
formers recognized the right of all men to liberty of con- 
science, the maxim was gradually hardened out into use, 
that errorists from their ranks should be silenced in the 
way in which they themselves had been condemned, and 



Essays of To-Day. 



that obstinate heretics should be imprisoned or sent out 
of the country. 

In Germany, the hard times of that terrible strife known 
as the Peasants' War brought out to the light that most 
fearful of all inspirations, — the impulse of Recklessness ; 
and the Miinster monarchy stands out to the light as a 
high-water line, marking off the limits of a lawful high-tide 
enthusiasm, from the wild and pitiless upheaval of a fanat- 
ical cyclone. Think for a moment of this scene in history ; 
and remember that it was an inspiration which, at the time, 
did not seem to those who engaged in it an exaggeration. 
Germany was filled with these broken auroral Ughts, — 
reflecting, in that northern country, with their fantastic 
shapes and patterns, the romanticism in religion and the 
individualism in politics then so commonly accepted on 
every hand. The Anti-trinitarians, who carried Luther's 
right of private judgment a step beyond Luther, shared 
the persecutions of the age. Hitzer, a learned friend of 
Zwinglius and a popular poet, was beheaded at Constance 
for his assertion of the unity of God. Servetus, by a double 
burning, — in ^^gy by the Catholics, and in reality by Cal- 
vin, — suffered death for his attempted restoration of true 
Christianity, and for his denial of the popular doctrine of 
the Trinity then in vogue. Campanus, who declared that 
the Holy Spirit was only the influence by which man vv^as 
redeemed and assimilated to God, died in prison in.Cleves 
about 1578. The followers of Laelius and Faustus Socinus 
preserved in Poland the views of their founder, and were 
attacked, as the extreme of Protestant individualism. The 
thought that God is continually making revelations by 



TJie Limits of Enthusiasm. 



illumination to all believers found its champion prophet in 
Sebastian Franck, — by turns a priest, a Lutheran preacher, 
a soap manufacturer, a learned printer, and always a popu- 
lar writer. There were times when these Spirits of Fanat- 
icism, with their new-found truths, developed into orderly, 
systematic schools of enthusiasts. The '' Assemblies of the 
Saints," and the '*Collegiants," — representing the two sides 
of Calvinism and Arminianism, — were the two orderly and 
systematic communities which were the logical results of 
the peculiar religious and socialistic tenets of that primitive 
patriarch, Simon Menno. Here the balance of enthusiasm 
was on the accredited side of law and order; the new 
movement was well ballasted ; there was a guiding, disci- 
plinary keel which kept it steady, and gave it an impulse 
to go forward. 

But the Anabaptists of Munster, in their wild excesses, 
have drawn in history the extreme line of fanaticism, as 
they have shown us the fearful lengths to which an intoxi- 
cated imagination can carry an entire community, as it has 
gone staggering under this worse than alcoholic drunken- 
ness, this human monopoly of divine power. Since they 
declared that they were inspired by the Holy Ghost, they 
were in consequence exalted above all law, and rebelled 
against every form of government. They formed, in fact, 
the spiritual condottiere or freebooter class of the Reforma- 
tion. In their individual illumination they despised all the 
institutions of Church and State, and justified their actions 
by quoting, in the right of private judgment, isolated pas- 
sages from the Bible for overthrowing all existing relations 
in society. These fanatic Anabaptists in Munster finally 



8 Essays of To-Day. 



formed a theocratic democracy, which they declared was to 
be the commencement of Christ's promised kingdom upon 
earth. One Mathiesen was regarded as the prophet 
Enoch, who long ago, it was foretold, was to appear be- 
fore the advent of Jesus, the King and Judge of the 
waiting world. 

After his death, in the street-riots of this struggle, John 
Bockelson, a tailor, was crowned as the spiritual vice-king 
of the world until, the Messiah should come. Prophets of 
the new theocracy were sent abroad throughout Germany ; 
a community of goods was established ; polygamy was in- 
troduced, as a return to primitive and patriarchal usage ; 
and the most sanguinary proceedings were enacted under 
the pretence of a divine inspiration. Here, then, in the city 
of Miinster, for ten days, a tailor-king, crowned and robed, 
with a likeminded hierarchy, ruled a mixed community, in 
which enthusiasts, sensualists, and levellers called their very 
lusts and animal passions the motions of the Holy Ghost. 
And when they died fighting for their short-lived day of 
power, they fought with the rage of tigers, and with the zeal 
of the Turks when they rally under the Prophet's standard 
for the defence of Islam and the religion of the Koran. 

It happens to us, then, when we see such exhibitions of 
fanaticism, that we try to draw the limits of enthusiasm 
outside of our own race and nation, and seek for some 
ethnic peculiarity as the cause of all this excess. We find 
tendencies towards fanaticism in the Jewish zealot, or the 
fatalistic Mahometan, or the fiery Spaniard, or the excitable 
Celt. The Italian, the Frenchman, and the Irishman be- 
come to us types of this extreme. 



TJie Limits of EntJmsiasm. 



But history reverses our preconceived impressions, and 
shows us that, after all, this tendency is not an ethnic but 
a universal one, which we share as a common inheritance 
of our humanness. It has been given to the English race 
in Protestant Europe to reveal the inner depths of a fanat- 
icism which has surpassed that of all other peoples, and 
has become the difficult problem for us to answer which we 
see it is, simply because it parodies, in its extremes, those 
very qualities which we hold most sacred, and glory in as 
our greatest heritage. For, just at that period when Eng- 
land was developing its constitutional government to the 
highest possible point, and, in its overthrow of the authority 
of Rome, was thrown back upon its own self-reliance for 
that reserve stock of latent guidance which it had lost in 
cutting away from the Papacy, — there arose the doctrine 
of the Right of Private Judgment ; and, in the establish- 
ment of this subjective rule in the place of the discarded 
objective one, the lawful limits of enthusiasm were ruth- 
lessly washed away. Absolutism in matters of religious 
conviction there must be somewhere. Three centres of 
authority presented themselves : in a church, in a parch- 
ment, in a mood of mind. And these were the three 
factors working and grinding, like stones upon the sea- 
shore in a September gale, during that revolution which 
surged and swayed, from the days of James I. to the final 
settlement of William and Mary. This was the epoch 
which has given us the three salient warring forces of the 
age : the High-church Cavalier, the Covenanting Presbyte- 
rian, and the Independent Roundhead. 

For, after all, the modified papacy of Laud, the Koran- 



lO Essays of To-Day. 



ized Bible of the Covenant, and the fanaticism of the Fifth 
Monarchy were the three representatives of absolutism 
which were produced by the throes of the great English 
Revolution. 

Perhaps never, in the history of any nation, has there 
been given such a lot of trial and discipline as that which 
hedged in the footsteps of Oliver Cromwell. This is the 
emphatic rendering of his life by Carlyle. Coming into 
power as the leader of a fanatical band of enthusiasts, he 
slipped off the character of a sectarian enthusiast in the 
presence of the many and far-reaching problems brought 
before him for solution ; and in refusing to be king, and in 
becoming the Lord Protector, he stood upon new and self- 
made ground, and was the target for every fanatical fire- 
arm of the day. There has never been just such a period 
in the history of any constitutional government. The 
" 7 to 8 Commission," which has given us our latest Presi- 
dent, is the nearest approach to this constitutional strain, 
which was not a usurpation. With a breadth and com- 
prehension which even Clarendon in his good-humored 
reasonableness was compelled to admit, Cromwell drew 
the line for himself as to what was required of him, — 
not now as the leader of a faction, but as the ruler of a 
commonwealth. And it was this wise self-restraint, this 
higher growth of foresight, this latent cosmopolitanship, 
which threw upon him that reputation for hypocrisy and 
cunning and insincerity which has lived on, from Claren- 
don's summing up of his character to the popular and 
superficial traditionalists of to-day. The whole kingdom 
was amazed at the man, and at the strong positions which 



The Limits of EntJmsiasm. 1 1 

he assumed. His enemies hated him ; his friends were 
jealous of him ; the party whips and the hacks of nu- 
merous cHques declared that he had deserted them, and 
had gone back upon his side : and thus, as it happens at 
every great constitutional crisis, — when the party rank 
and file cannot behold the coming light that is afar off, 
and can only feel the dust of their own march and hear 
the heavy tread of their own numbers, — he stood alone, 
reviled and misunderstood when living, but justified in 
the light of clearer after-days when dead. 

Here and there through history we see these towering 
images, standing above the ordinary plane, as the image of 
Nebuchadnezzar's dream stood upon the Babylonian sands. 
What if it is a mixed image ? Have we not all this mixt- 
ure in our nature ; and are not the world's great men 
after all only men ? The feet of mire and clay — have we 
not this from that first man which is of the earth earthy ? 
The legs of iron and brass — grit and assurance — is not 
this the necessary alloy around which the finer qualities 
must gather and harden ? The head of silver and gold — 
is not this the nature crowned after all with its own best 
gifts ? And is not all this the way of human nature : 
** every man in his own order ; " " to every seed its own 
body"? The hot-headed and the rebellious; the whim- 
sical religious, who would willingly do no harm, but who 
cleared the way for artful rogues and planning knaves ; the 
vast crowd of hangers-on to success, who had every thing 
to gain and nothing to lose ; the crushed Cavaliers, who, 
in their poor but respectable gentility, tried to forget their 
losses and to remember only that they had once been gen- 



12 Essays of To-Day. 



tlemen ; the Romanists, who in this civil strife had been 
let alone, and who were now coy enough about giving their 
friendship to either cooing charmer ; the successful army, 
which was in no hurry to be disbanded ; the machine 
Parliament, with its hard-headed managers, who were 
greatly disturbed lest Cromwell now should go too far ; 
and, crowning all these teazing elements, the gypsy-like 
troops of fanatical Quakers, Baptists, Levellers, and Fifth- 
monarchy men, — pressed home upon Cromwell their mul- 
tiform objections to his policy, and forced him to rise above 
all their differing phases of enthusiasm, and draw the lines 
of government with a firm hand himself. It is astonishing 
in the calm light of to-day to survey these times, and to 
believe that serious and conscientious men could hold such 
vagaries outside of the walls of a madhouse. Plots against 
the Protector's life became the order of the day, covered 
by the Biblical sanction of Ehud's and Jael's examples, 
and other precedents from the stormy period of Israel's 
rule in the days of the Judges ! The followers of George 
Fox, exalting their peculiar views of the Inward Light and 
the extraordinary impulse of the Holy Ghost, interrupted 
places of worship and courts of justice with their ecstatic 
cries ; and, having suffered the minor persecutions of the 
whipping-post and the stocks, finally set up their own 
meetings, and became organized and equipped as the sect 
of Quakers. The instances of their wildness and extrava- 
gance, as given in Neal's "History of the Puritans," show 
us the extremes of an unballasted enthusiasm. *' A female 
came into Whitehall Chapel, stark naked, in the midst of 
public worship, the Lord Protector himself being present. 



TJie Limits of Enthusiasm, 



. . . Another came into the Parliament House, with a 
trenchard in her hands, which she broke in pieces, say- 
ing", * Thus shall ye be broken in pieces ! ' . . . Thomas 
Aldam, having complained to the Protector of the im- 
prisonment of some friends in the country, and not find- 
ing redress, took off his cap and tore it in pieces, saying, 
' So shall thy government be torn from thee and thy house.' 
Several, pretending an extraordinary message from Heaven, 
went about the streets of London, denouncing the judg- 
ments of God against the Protector and his council. One 
came to the door of the Parliament House with a drawn 
sword, and wounded several who were present, saying he 
was inspired by the Holy Ghost to kill every man that sat 
in the House." But perhaps the most extravagant instance 
of this circumambient fanaticism then so frequent, was 
that of James Naylor, formerly an officer in Lambert's 
army, and a much-admired speaker among these people, 
some of whom, we are told, " had such a veneration for 
him that they styled him the Everlasting Sun of Right- 
eousness, the Prince of Peace, the only-begotten Son of 
God, and the Fairest among ten thousand." When he was 
in prison at Exeter, many of his friends and followers 
kissed his feet, and after his release went before him into 
the city of Bristol. They walked before him, bareheaded, 
spreading their scarfs and handkerchiefs in the way, and 
crying out, ** Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God of hosts ! 
Hosanna in the Highest ! Holy, holy is the Lord God 
of Israel ! " The magistrates of Bristol had him again 
arrested, and sent him up to Parliament upon a charge of 
blasphemy : first, for admitting religious worship to be paid 



Essays of To-Day. 



to him ; and, secondly, for assuming the names and attri- 
butes of the Almighty. To the first of these charges he 
replied ingeniously, in 2, petitio-principii method of reason- 
ing, that he might not refuse any honors which others who 
were moved by the Holy Ghost gave him ; and to the second 
charge, on being asked whether he had reproved the per- 
sons who had given him divine honors and titles, he replied, 
" If they had it from the Lord, what had I to do to reprove 
them ? I do abhor that any honors due to God should be 
given to me, as I am a creature ; but it pleased the Lord 
to set me up as a sign of the coming of the Righteous 
One, and what has been done to me, passing through the 
town, 'twas commanded by the power of the Lord to be 
suffered to be done to the outward man, as a sigit ; but I 
abhor any honor as a creature." 

Another phase of opposition to the existing government, 
under the cloak of religious enthusiasm, occurred later on in 
Cromwell's life, when the same ruling idea of a monopoly 
of divine powers, or an incarnation of the Holy Ghost in 
human passions, prevailed. The extreme independents and 
enthusiastic republicans, having signally failed in their rev- 
olutionary endeavors in Parliament, agreed, to the number 
of three hundred, to force a revolution in the government, 
to kill the Protector, and proclaim Jesus as king. It was 
the Miinster movement of the Anabaptists in Germany re- 
peated upon Enghsh soil a century later. Still there danced 
before the tremulous vision of these enthusiasts that far-off 
prophecy of the prophet Daniel, — the stone cut without 
human hands tumbling in upon the erect image of the 
existing government, and dashing it into fragments. 



The Limits of Enthusiasm. 15 

Their arms and ammunition were carefully stored away, 
ready for that day when the fulness of the plot had come. 
They copied the war-cry and the standard of Judas Macca- 
beus, as he fought against the tyranny of Antiochus. A 
lion couchant, — referring to the tribe of Judah, — with the 
motto, " Who shall rouse him up ? " was their standard ! 

The Rev. John Hunt, in his " History of Religious 
Thought in England," describes with great vividness this 
broken-light period of rehgious enthusiasm in English 
history. The " Two Witnesses " of the Muggletonians, 
the Mosaical philosophy of the Rosicrucians, and the 
preaching of the Fifth-monarchy prophets, are alike care- 
fully and philosophically considered. There can be little 
doubt that these latter fanatics publicly preached about 
Cromwell, as the little horn which made war upon the 
saints immediately before the millennium period, and was 
at last overcome by them. One Charles Teake, on the day 
when Cromwell was proclaimed Lord Protector, preached 
about this little horn as the persecutor of the saints, and 
asked, " Who shall be your lord protector in the day when 
Jehovah's fury shall be poured out like fire t " 

But, as so often has happened in the history of English 
conspiracies, their plans were discovered, and these restless 
Fifth-monarchy men, with their old warlike passions, — the 
last remnant of the civil strife, — were imprisoned until 
after Cromwell's death, when, falling into new disturbances, 
they were executed at the time of Charles the Second's 
restoration. 

It is dijfficult to realize all this in England : difficult 
to imagine the British House of Commons stopping its 



1 6 Essays of To- Day. 



business for eleven days for the trial of this poor James 
Naylor, who imagined that God was in him, and that all 
this adoration from the people was not to him, but to the 
divinity within him. This Fifth-monarchy fanaticism, then, 
was not an enthusiasm smouldering in a corner. It blazed 
out in the foremost places in the land. In the House of 
Commons, the men in authority had ecstasies publicly. 
After the expulsion of the Presbyterians, the preacher, 
Hugh Peters, started up in the middle of a sermon and 
cried out, *' Now I have it by revelation, — now I must tell 
you : This army must root up monarchy, not only here, but 
in France and other kingdoms round about. This is to 
bring you out of Egypt. This army is that corner-stone, 
cut out of the mountains, which must dash the powers of 
the earth to pieces. But it is objected that the way we 
walk in is without precedent. What think you of the 
Virgin Mary t Was there ever any precedent before that 
a woman should conceive a child without the company of a 
man .'' This is an age to make examples and precedents 
in ! " ^ The literature of these days is filled with the fantas- 
tic talk and follies of the so-called illuminated and inspired. 
It shines forth in Cromwell's letters, in Clarendon's annals, 
in George Fox's journal, and in Burton's Parliamentary 
diary of the times. Women and soldiers would struggle 
to mount the pulpit and preach ; and, in the scuffle at the 
foot of the stairs, some happy third party would leap over 
them and take the coveted ranting-post. 

The strangest ceremonies took place in public. In 1644, 
the Anabaptists rebaptized a hundred men and women to- 

1 Walker's History of Independency, part ii. p. 49. 1648. 



The Limits of EntJmsiasm. 17 

gether, at twilight, in streams, in branches of the Thames 
and elsewhere, plunging them in the water over head and 
ears. One Oates was brought to trial for the murder of a 
girl, Annie Martin, who died a few days after her baptism 
of a cold which had seized her. William Simpson, one of 
George Fox's disciples, '' was moved of the Lord to go, at 
several times for three years, naked and barefoot before 
his brethren, as a sign unto them, in the markets, courts, 
towns, cities, to priests' houses, and to great men's houses, 
telling them, so shall they all be stripped naked, as he was 
stripped naked. And sometimes he was moved to put on 
hair sackcloth,, and to besmear his face, and to tell them, 
so would the Lord besmear all their rehgion, as he was be- 
smeared." ^ All such exhibitions as these are a curious 
fulfilment of Plato's prophecy of what would surely come 
to pass in the tentative efforts of mankind to form an ideal 
community upon earth. " In the fifth book of his Republic, 
there is a striking anticipation of every scheme of universal 
society which has been propounded by religious fanatics or 
political theorists, from the propagation of Christianity to 
the present day." ^ 

Thus even in Plato's paper republic we find those com- 
munistic germs which, when forced on by religious or 
political enthusiasm, have given us a Fifth-monarchy move- 
ment, or a reign of terror in a French Commune. 

Before and after this transformative epoch in the con- 
stitutional history of England, — when, underneath all these 
disorders, the deep, broad strata of the nation's common- 

1 Fox's Journal, 6th ed. 1836. 

- Maurice's Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, vol. i. p. 167. 

2 



Essays of To-Day, 



sense was settling down to a hard-won constitutionality, — ■ 
there was an era of fanaticism, a prelude and a finale to 
the strife of the Revolution. 

In the days of James I. and Elizabeth, the prevailing 
fanaticism took the form of superstitious dread. Every 
one was afraid of witches : every one, from Sir Matthew 
Hale to the most ignorant ploughboy, believed in the fear- 
ful, cunning power of witches. Bishop Jewell, preaching 
before the Queen, tells her that witches and sorcerers are 
on the increase. Some competent ministerial experts on 
this subject, he declares, assert: "That they have had in 
their parish at one instant seventeen or eighteen witches : 
meaning such as could work miracles supernaturallie ; 
that they work spells by which men pine away, even unto 
death, — their color fadeth, their flesh rotteth, their speech 
is benumbed, their senses are bereft ; that, instructed by 
the devil, they make ointments of the bowels and members 
of children, whereby they ride in the aire, and accomplish 
all their desires. When a child is not baptized, or defended 
by the sign of the cross, then the witches catch them from 
their mothers' sides in the night, ... kill them, ... or, 
after burial, steale them out of their graves, and seethe them 
in a caldron untill their flesh be made potable. It is an 
infallible rule that everie fortnight, or at the least everie 
moneth, each witch must kill one child at the least, for his 
part." All this witchcraft and bewitching business was 
the fanaticism of fear. 

The revealed religion of that day gave to human nature's 
sense of dread the necessary material for the manufacture 
of those furies which ever follow mankind, and lash the 



The Limits of EntJmsiasm. 19 

race with the remorse of their revengeful stings. And 
when we remember that all this superstition was within 
the defined domain of Christianity, and was formed into a 
dogma of dread necessary to be believed, to be considered 
orthodox and of good report, we can well understand the 
sad dilemma to* which the men and women of that age 
were reduced : either to rebel against a creed like this, and 
stand afar off among the uncovenanted and those who were 
foreordained to be damned, or to believe in a Christ who 
in some mysterious way was outwitted by the devil with 
his legions of witches. 

The last great enthusiasm of the English race, the third 
and final freak of fanaticism, — coming after the supersti- 
tion of witchcraft and the illuminated politics of the Fifth- 
monarchists, — was the magical monopoly of divine power 
wielded by that master mind, John Wesley. The letters of 
Wesley himself, Southey's account of the man and the 
movement, and the lately published life of Wesley, by 
Tyerman, have made the reading world familiar with those 
many and strange cases of religious excitement which are 
within the border-land of those two worlds, the supernatural 
and the psychological. 

Never in the history of religious thought has there been 
given such a field for the contagion of enthusiasm, as in the 
guiding and fundamental principles of Wesleyanism, No 
priest, no altar, no sacrifice, no hierarchy, no traditions, are 
necessary. Given the human soul, worked upon by the 
commonest principles of religious awe, and a ubiquitous 
Holy Ghost, nearest to hand to him who feels the most 
and calls the loudest, — these are the simple elements 



20 Essays of To-Day. 



needed for that daily miracle of renewal, that miraculous 
coming of the Spirit of God every day into the human 
heart, analogued in the Roman Church by the daily 
miracle of the coming of Christ into the sacred wafer at 
the solemn moment of consecration, when, as Father Tom 
Burke once said, the Son of God hurries from the right 
hand of his Father's throne, to be present where his fol- 
lowers adore him. 

Justification by faith ; thorough sanctification up to the 
point of perfection ; full assurance of salvation ; a higher- 
life exaltation, which renders one dead to the far-off pri- 
mary-school works of the law ; instantaneous conversion ; 
the possibility of present miracles ; the witnessing Spirit of 
God, present in the commonest affairs of daily life, — all 
these were the doctrines which lifted this movement out 
of the dead rubbish of its surroundings, and gave it a 
swing forward, with so much dash and impetus ! 

Taine describes it in these words : " A miracle has been 
wrought, and can be wrought at any moment, suddenly, 
under any circumstances, without warning. Some sinner, 
the oldest and most hardened, without wishing it, without 
having dreamed of it, falls down weeping, his heart melted 
by grace. The hidden thoughts which fermented long in 
these gloomy imaginations break out suddenly into storms, 
and the dull, brutal mind is shaken by nervous fits, which 
it had not known before. ... At Kingswood, Whitfield, 
having collected the miners, a savage race, saw the white 
gutters made by the tears which plentifully fell from their 
black cheeks, — black as they came out of their coal-pits. 
Some trembled and fell; others had transports of joy, — 



The Limits of Enthusiasm. 21 

ecstasies. The god and the brute which each man carries 
in himself were let loose ; the physical machine was up- 
set ; emotion was turned into madness, and the madness 
became contagious." An eye-witness says : " At Everton, 
some were shrieking, some were roaring aloud. . . . The 
most general was a loud breathing, like that of people half- 
strangled and gasping for life ; and, indeed, almost all the 
cries were like those of human creatures dying in bitter 
anguish. Great numbers wept without any noise ; others 
fell down as dead. ... I stood upon the pew-seat, as did 
a young man in the opposite peWj — an able-bodied, fresh, 
healthy countryman ; but, in a moment when he seemed 
to think of nothing else, down he dropped, with a violence 
inconceivable. ... I heard the stamping of his feet ready 
to break the boards, as he lay in strong convulsions at the 
bottom of the pew. ... I saw a sturdy boy, about eight 
years old, who roared above his fellows ; his face was red 
as scarlet. And almost all on whom God laid his hand 
turned either very red or almost black." 

The smoke of these religious burnings, these human holo- 
causts offered up to that divinely-forgiving God of the gospel 
whom Wesley and his followers preached so continually, 
spread into other portions of the religious world ; and en- 
thusiasm became the watchword in every quarter. In the 
North American Colonies, all sorts of strange sects sud- 
denly appeared ; and the vagaries of the Old World pre- 
sented themselves with fresh vigor upon this virgin soil. 
Second-adventists, Shakers, Fourierites, Voltaireans, Hard- 
shell Baptists, Christians, Mennonites, Dunkers, came to 
the surface in the lavish richness and freedom of the New 



22 Essays of To -Day, 



World. In 1780, in London, the aroused enthusiasm took 
the popular form of hatred of Popery ; as seen in the Lord 
George Gordon riots, and the description of these times 
by Dickens, in his story of Barnaby Rudge. The prisons 
were forced open by the mob ; houses were burned ; bar- 
rels of liquor were broken open in the streets, and women 
and children in many cases drank themselves to death. 
In America, this spirit of enthusiasm took a political form, 
and spent itself in freeing the colonies from the mother 
country. In France, it took a social turn, and developed 
into the terrors of the French Revolution. *' Enthusiasm " 
became a scare-word to the respectable and conservative 
mind, and was used as a synonyme for rebellion and fanat- 
icism. In the will of William Price, the founder of the 
Price Lectures in Trinity Church, Boston, it is expressly 
declared that one of the lectures is to be against " enthu- 
siasm ; " by which technical use of the word he had in mind 
the common and fanatical meaning of this much-abused 
term Enthusiasm. 

But enough of these instances of enthusiasm. We all 
have our moods and prejudices, our passions and excite- 
ments. Sometimes the individual or the nation is strong 
enough and sufficiently well-balanced to bear them. At 
other times we are broken by them, and they unsettle us. 
It is Taine, in his review of the strange career of Jonathan 
Swift, who says : " There are, indeed, but two modes of 
agreeing with the world : mediocrity of mind and supe- 
riority of intelligence ; the one for the public and the fools, 
the other for artists and philosophers. The one consists in 
seeing nothing ; the other in seeing all." 



TJie Limits of EntJiiisiasin. 23 

Here, then, we can rest. To understand the inner mean- 
ing of these upheavals of enthusiasm in human character 
and in history, to know their lawful lines of action and their 
lawful limits, we must not be content to see in these phe- 
nomena mere surface outbreaks, coming and going like the 
wind, whither it listeth, — we must look deeply, if we 
would see all the elements that are here to view. 

Isaac Taylor, in his essay upon Enthusiasm, has given 
us a world of light, and a true canon of criticism, upon 
this subject of lawful and unlawful inspiration. Dr. Way- 
land, also, has discussed this question of the extent of 
religious claims upon us.^ 

The secret springs of enthusiasm have an undoubted 
origin in the physiological and psychological condition of 
individuals and of nations. We must get down to the 
physical basis, if we would know the origin of the enthu- 
siasm and the rationale of its limits. Climate, modes of 
life, religion, forms of amusement, literature, condition of 
society, — all unite to give the nature its trend, its swing, 
its bias ; and in these formative principles lie hidden 
the germs of those undeveloped passions and prejudices 
which, when aroused, we recognize as enthusiasm or fa- 
naticism according as we draw the line and establish the 
limits. Imagination, contagion, and the germinal freaks of 
insanity, all unite to spread the ravages of this electric wave 
of impulse which we call enthusiasm. Thus it comes to 
pass — because of the mixed elements in it, and because 
m*en when aroused and excited are apt to part company 
with the cool mood of reason, which is its habitual mood — 
that this subject of enthusiasm, with its boundary lines, is a 

* " The Limitations of Human Responsibility," by Francis Wayland, Brown University. 1838. 



24 Essays of To-Day. 



difficult one, and must ever remain, at the best, a debatable 
border-land, fought over and striven for again and again : 
now claimed by the regular troops, now held by the gypsy 
camp and the marauding freebooter. For we all get at last 
to believing that which we have long been imagining, and 
are wanting in our hearts to believe. 

To conclude, then : we must first of all discriminate 
between that form of enthusiasm which is self-originated 
and consequently real, and that form of it which is at best 
a reproduction of some former phase of power, and is a 
second-hand article, spurious in kind and weak in degree. 
The efforts of Newman and Pusey, in the Catholic revival 
of 1843, were, after all, only the attempted return to a for- 
mer condition of Christianity, which in its ruling spirit was 
utterly anachronous. The Church has its moods, quite as 
conspicuously as Nature with her seasons, and man with his 
passions. The Rituahstic revival has been a mood in the 
direction of ecclesiastical ceremonialism. 

The genius of Edward Irving, in the movement which 
is called by his name, ran away with him, in his hopeless 
efforts to revive, in his day, the apostolic supernaturalism 
of the church at Corinth. He died in the fog of miracles, 
where every object was dim and distorted, and where men 
became weird in their haziness and were as trees walking. 
This was another picture of the enthusiasm of a mood. 
It seems as if ecclesiastical moods were the regular 
attendants of ecclesiastical reproductions : as if, with the 
revival of obsolete and unfamiliar lights, there must 
come the strange, stray glancings of auroral and me- 
teoric wonders, — phenomena which adH elements of mys- 



The Limits of Enthusiasm. 25 

tery to the subject, without increasing the Hght whereby 
to solve it. 

Ewald, in his history of Israel, when speaking of the re- 
vived Hebraism of Ezra and Nehemiah, uses these words: 
" Whenever an institution which has been dominant in 
earlier times is revived in a later day, or when one first 
framed in distant lands or ages is adopted by strangers 
with fresh predilection or enthusiasm, there is great danger 
that its dazzling and misleading externalities, rather than its 
essence, will attract the eye and sink into the heart of the 
majority. Even if the case is one of a religion already 
sanctified by its former greatness and its antiquity, the holi- 
ness which is embraced with new fervor may very easily be 
nothing but that outward sanctity which itself, in the first 
instance, was only hallowed by the true and eternal holiness 
of the life and contents of the religion." In Israel's case, 
this reproduced enthusiasm was of the revival order, and 
was therefore neither strong nor lasting. For a little while, 
something like the primitive zeal was seen ; but before 
long, the earlier enthusiasm of the penitent exiles broke 
down amid the manufactured externalities of their faith ; 
and there was no more religious spring, no elastic rebound, 
to the fagged-out nation. 

And here we meet with the radical question of the sub- 
ject. It is this : How -can we tell the true from the false 
enthusiasm.'' What constitute the limits of that enthusi- 
asm which is a true impulse coming from the pure, unsul- 
lied depths of character.^ By what canon can we judge 
the claims of all enthusiasts, and eventually learn to dis- 
criminate between that which is from the upper springs of 



26 Essays of To- Day. 



character and that which is from the lower, baser motives ? 
What is the test ? 

We can but approximate to an answer. This puzzUng 
question cannot be ultimately settled within the confined 
limits of a single essay. Let me state a few propositions 
which may guide us through the tangled thicket, until an 
acknowledged highway shall be there. 

Let us take the claims of Apollonius of Tyana, Mahomet, 
Swedenborg, Joseph Smith, Ann Lee the Shakeress, Augus- 
tus Comte, and Andrew Jackson Davis, the great Western 
apostle of Spiritualism ; and let us compare them with the 
lofty claims of the Founder of Christianity. What shall we 
say of these matched faiths, these parallel enthusiasms } 

1. We affirm of true enthusiasm, that it must correspond 
to the existing laws of reason ; it must not first create new 
laws, and then be judged by any packed tribunal. 

2. It must receive the sanction of posterity : not neces- 
sarily the sanction of its own day and generation. 

3. The pressure of the individual's inspiration limits his 
responsibility for imparting his views to others. This may 
be a debatable point ; but the weight of reason seems to 
rest, after all, on the side of this proposition. 

The inspired man — whether he be really inspired, or is 
a so-called inspired man, or imagines himself inspired — 
can use only moral means for the propagation of his tenets. 
Here we get at the root of the philosophy of religious 
persecutions. The Turk forced his creed upon Southern 
Europe, and John Sobieski arose to fight it down. Philip 
II. forced Alva to coerce the stubborn Hollanders, and 
William of Orange recognized the enthusiasm of his oppo- 



TJie Limits of Enthusiasm. 27 

sition as from God.^ So with all religious wars. How far 
any of us have a right to force our so-called enthusiasm 
upon others, because we feel an individual pressure ; how 
far we are responsible for our load of zeal, — is an interest- 
ing question in moral philosophy. 

The case of the nonjurors ; the Free-Church disruption 
in Scotland ; the canvassing of a city into districts, to be 
visited for a Moody tabernacle, — are all instances of relig- 
ious pressure begotten by individual inspiration. Thomas 
Aquinas, in his " Summa Theologia," — in dealing with the 
question whether infidels are to be compelled into accept- 
ing the faith, — considers, among other objections to com- 
pulsion, a saying of Augustine, that a man may do other 
things unwillingly, but that he can only believe willingly ; 
and that the will cannot be compelled. Still it is written, 
" Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them 
to come in, that my house may be filled." The final con- 
clusion he makes is, that Jews and Gentiles who have 
never professed the faith are not to be compelled to be- 
lieve, and that wars against them are lawful only as means 
of preventing them from impeding the progress of the 
faith. But those who have taken the faith upon them, or 
who still profess it, becoming heretics and apostates, are in 
a different condition ; on such corporal compulsion is to 
be exercised, that they may fulfil what they have promised 
and hold fast what they have undertaken. 

4. When human nature is unduly aroused by any one 
strong motive, the probabilities are that lesser and un- 
worthy motives will in the long run take the lead. We 

1 See the Thanksgiving Collect after a Victory, in the Prayer-book. 



28 Essays of To-Day 



see this, in history, in the cases of Henry IV. of France, 
Henry VIII. in England, Rienzi, Cromwell, Aaron Burr; 
and, in the Church, in the examples of Savonarola the 
prophet, Thomas a Becket the ecclesiastic, Erasmus the 
philosopher, and Dr. Livingstone at the last exalting the 
explorer in his nature rather than the missionary. 

5. In any true estimate of this subject, room must be 
made for the element of individual temperament, which has 
much to do with the amount and the quality of zeal. As 
a prevailing bias, giving tone and color to the verdict of the 
judgment, to temperament must be allowed its full share of 
causation. An illustration of this is found in Professor 
Seeley's argument, in the chapter on The Enthusiasm of 
Humanity, in " Ecce Homo." 

We may define enthusiasm, then, as, — 

1. A heat or ardor of mind caused by a belief of private 
revelation. . . . 

2. Liveliness of imagination : elevation of fancy. — Worcester. 

Or,— 

A belief or conceit of private revelation ; the vain confi- 
dence or opinion of a person that he has special divine commu- 
nications from the Supreme Being, or familiar intercourse with 
Him. — Webster. 

And the lawful hmits of enthusiasm are found, when it 
exists — 

1. Within that habitual cool mood of reason which is the 
normal phase of reason ; when — 

2. The harmonious balance of the entire nature corrects 
with its after-judgment the aroused and over-excited force; 
when — 



The Limits of EjitJmsiasm. 29 

3. The average Christian consciousness of the age ap- 
proves of the new departure ; and when — 

4. The after-results, in our Lord's words, verify the pre- 
tensions of the present, and "wisdom is justified of her 
children." 



30 Essays of To-Day. 



. II. 

THE AGE OF THE SCHOOLMEN. 

^ I ^HE scene of Christ with the doctors in the temple — 
that well-known event in the child-life of Jesus — 
finds its counterpart in the history of Christianity, when, 
from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries, Christian truth 
was busy with the doctors, " both hearing them and asking 
them questions." It is hardly correct to designate this 
period, as some have done, with the title of the Childhood 
Period of the Church. There never has been in the his- 
tory of Christianity so much technical knowledge, or such 
a lavish display of the mechanics of human learning, as in 
the days of the Schoolmen. And yet, in a certain sense, 
this period finds its analogue in the boyhood period of the 
growing human mind. Who does not remember, in his 
own past history, the story-telling, conundrum-raising, rebus- 
answering age ; when, by the open fire, in long winter even- 
ings, with the world shut out, and the chosen few well 
initiated into the technical intricacies of the familiar games, 
the power of childish imagination shows its influence, re- 
produced in conquering the dreary rules of the Latin gram- 
mar ; and Sinbad the Sailor and Ali Baba seem to develop 
that early precocity which so soon masters the prepositions 
which govern the ablative, or the multiplication table, or the 
thrice read and learned piece from the "Academy Speaker" 



The Age of the Schoolmen. 3 1 

for declamation day ? No father can go over again the 
dusty highway of the old school-books with his children, 
and find the same long rules to be committed to memory, 
and the forgotten but irrepressible sheep and birds and 
horseshoe-nails of the arithmetic, without wondering at 
that technical prowess in by-gone days which now fails 
him, and without seeing his old knack of adaptability re- 
produced in the mind of the youthful learner. 

And in very much this same way, with this same pre- 
cocity and adaptation, with a technical accuracy which is 
to-day a marvel, with a memory for minutiae which is un- 
paralleled in the history of mental philosophy, and with 
the child-prodigy type of imagination, which reappears as 
a power in the technical tasks assigned to them, — the 
Schoolmen stand out in Church history as the representa- 
tives of Christianity among the doctors ; just as the Cru- 
saders show us Christianity in the warrior age, and the 
monks represent it as at home with the ruling thought of 
self-sacrifice. 

It is this Age of the Schoolmen v/hich is the subject of 
this paper. It is a long and interesting period, but one 
that is strangely vague in its scenic surroundings. 

It seems like winter in the forest, or at the sea-shore, — 
this long stretch of solitariness and individualism, from 
Charlemagne to Luther. We read of Abelard's lectures, 
at Paris, in his controversy with William of Champeaux, 
or of Thomas Aquinas, at Cologne ; but there are very 
few trellis-vines for our imagination to run upon. Scott's 
" Ivanhoe " and " Quentin Durward " give us, perhaps, our 
most vivid impressions of this period. But the field is an 



32 Essays of To-Day. 



open and inviting one for any bold venturer who would 
take up Canon Kingsley's mantle, and explore this dim 
and indistinct region. 

It is a difficult matter to group these various authors into 
manageable classes which can be easily handled, without 
being vague and general, or too encyclopedic and literal. 
These Schoolmen were many, and their writings are miscel- 
laneous in character, and are always profoundly technical. 
Some of them were jurists, and shaped the old Roman 
law into the new needs of the period of the Renaissance. 
Some of them were philosophers and metaphysicians ; 
others never strayed beyond the orbit of theology ; while 
yet others brought their rich gleanings in common-law and 
metaphysics and logic, and laid them down at the feet of 
the traditional Catholic theology. It is Dean Milman who 
condenses into a single paragraph the opposite tendencies 
of this age. "Monastic Christianity," he writes, "led to 
two unexpected but inevitable results : to the expansion of 
the human understanding, even till it strove to overleap the 
lofty barriers of the established Catholic doctrine ; and to 
a sullen and secret mutiny, at length to an open insurrec- 
tion, against the power of the sacerdotal order. ... Of this 
first movement, — the intellectual struggle for emancipa- 
tion, — Abelard was the representative and the victim. Of 
the second, — far more popular, immediate, and, while it 
lasted, perilous, that which rose up against the whole hie- 
rarchical system of Christendom, — the champion was Ar- 
nold of Brescia." It was towards Abelard in philosophy, 
or to Arnold in politics, that at last the ponderous system 
of the scholastic thinking swung around, — like a stranded 



The Age of the ScJioolmen. 33 

vessel going to pieces in different ways at opposite ends 
of the same rock. The ark which had floated so long over 
the face of Europe, with every form of life within it, struck 
at last upon the projecting peak of the new age, and 
found a fresh, green world awaiting it, after its dreary se- 
clusion for centuries. Taine declares that the " mark of 
genius i3 the discovery of some wide, unexplored region in 
human nature." This is the all-powerful test which he 
continually uses throughout his varying judgments upon 
human nature, as represented in the study of English lit- 
erature. Certain poets and writers possessed this power, 
and they were great and powerful in their influence. Others 
are mere decorative artists, with an eye to the beautiful ; 
but they discover nothing. It was the discoveries of Bacon, 
seen from afar, which brought the system of scholasticism 
to an end ; which snapped the cable-lines that had con- 
nected every thinker with the far-off Aristotle, and caused 
the Saracenic illumination, which had been so picturesque 
and silvery in the night, to be like a forgotten moon, — 
still shining if you hunt for it in the heavens, but unno- 
ticed in the splendors of an October sunrise. 

Aristotle in the past ; the Moorish ascendency the great 
intellectual rival of the Schoolmen ; and the inductional 
philosophy of Bacon the surely-coming key of power, — 
these are the three steps in any true survey of the intellect- 
ual and religious development of Europe at this period. 

Perhaps nowhere has this contrast between the deductive 
tendencies of the old system and the inductional methods 
of the new been more forcibly shown than by Macaulay, in 
his essay on Bacon ; " We have sometimes thought an 

3 



34 Essays of To -Day. 



amusing fiction might be written, in which a disciple of 
Epictetus and a disciple of Bacon should be introduced as 
fellow-travellers. They come to a village where the small- 
pox has just begun to rage, and find houses shut up, inter- 
course suspended, the sick abandoned, mothers weeping in 
terror over their children. The stoic assures the dismayed 
population that there is nothing bad in the small-pox, and 
that to a wise man disease, deformity, death, the loss of 
friends, are not evils ; the Baconian takes out a lancet 
and begins to vaccinate. They find a body of miners in 
great dismay; an explosion of noisome vapors has just 
killed many of those who were at work, and the survivors 
are afraid to venture into the cavern. The stoic assures 
them that such an accident is nothing but a mere airoirpo- 
r]'y^evov ; the Baconian, who has no such fine word at his 
command, contents himself with devising a safety-lamp. 
They find a shipwrecked merchant wringing his hands on 
the shore ; his vessel, with an inestimable cargo, has just 
gone down, and he is reduced in a moment from opulence 
to beggary. The stoic exhorts him not to seek happiness 
in things which lie without himself, and repeats the whole 
chapter of Epictetus, — irpo'^ tov<^ r-qv aTvoplav BeBoLKora'^ ; 
the Baconian constructs a diving-bell, goes down in it, and 
returns with the most precious effects from the wreck. It 
would be easy to multiply illustrations of the difference 
between the philosophy of thorns and the philosophy of 
fruit, — the philosophy of words and the philosophy of 
works." 

All great inventions and discoveries seem simple enough 
after the world has possessed them. It is the long-waiting 



The Age of the Schoolmen. 35 

period, when fresh power uses by-gone methods, which tests 
our thorough or our superficial criticism. We profit by the 
experience of those who have gone before us, quite as truly 
in the world of thought as in the practical affairs of every- 
day life ; and that criticism, which is intolerant of the 
struggles of the scholastic doctors to get juice out of the 
syllogisms of Aristotle, fails to remember that it is not 
always possible to bring the new wine and the new vessel 
together. 

Only look at the state of Europe at this period. The 
schools and universities which had grown out of the efforts 
of Charlemagne and Alcuin were the fortresses and depos- 
itaries of Christian civilization. At Canterbury, at Paris, 
at Cologne, at Bologna, these monastic searchers after 
truth worked on in silence. It was barbarism's winter out 
of doors ; but within the monasteries, upon the welcoming 
hearth, the logs cracked merrily, and the long evenings 
told of immense work accomplished. 

It is difficult for us in this age to begin to comprehend 
the technical elaborations of this long metaphysical period, 
because it is difficult for us to take in the idea that every 
thought in hymn, in prayer, in poem, in sermon, in letter, 
and in conversation, had to be pressed through the huge 
metallic machinery of the Aristotelian method. Every 
thing was done by the a priori logical instrument, which in 
ages past had been created for theory and not for practice, 
and which should have been preserved as a specimen of 
past reasoning, and not used as the every-day standard 
for the every-day requirements. There was no room for 
any induction, or for any outside methods of intellection ; 



36 Essays of To- Day. 



every thing was stretched across the Procrustean bed of 
Aristotle ; every thing was deduction from the many cov- 
ered points of the law as then declared. 

In Dr. Vaughan's recent life of Thomas Aquinas, — a 
book written entirely from the Roman Catholic standpoint, 
— the methods of elaboration and the habits of thought of 
this most astonishing of the Schoolmen are carefully and 
minutely described. The brain aches on simply reading 
the heads and titles of these discourses. To follow under- 
standingly through this wilderness of Latin becomes a ven- 
ture which the trained expert alone will dare to assume; 
and the ordinary reader returns to his every-day reading 
with very much the same feeling that the early discoverers 
of this country must have had when they laid on the adjec- 
tives, but were powerless to draw maps. And these men, 
Duns Scotus, and Albertus Magnus, and the rest of them, 
were looked up to as having by their labors acquired a right 
of way over every pathway of human reasoning. 

" As soon as Chaucer gets into a reflective mood, straight- 
way St. Thomas, Peter Lombard, the Manual of Sins, 
the treatise on Definition and Syllogism, the army of the 
Ancients and of the Fathers, descend from their glory, 
enter his brain and speak in his stead ; and the trouvere's 
pleasant voice becomes the dogmatic and sleep-inspiring 
voice of a doctor." ^ 

It was this heavy instrument, the scholastic philosophy, 
which was applied to every department of human thought. 
The well-remembered marvels of these doctors and teachers 
seemed to shut out from the public the thought that there 

1 Taine's Eng. Lit., i. 213. 



The Age of the ScJwolmen. 37 

might possibly be, some day, a discovery in the line of 
new methods ; and thus the old terms everlastingly ran on. 
But, by and by, the subjects began to give out ; there were 
not conundrums enough on earth left to these devouring 
minds, and the " more things than are dreamed of in our 
philosophy," began to appear. 

Here are some of the problems which affected the mind 
of St. Thomas Aquinas, in his " Summa Theologia : " 
** Utrum angelus diligat se ipsum dilectione naturali vel 
electiva } Utrum in statu innocentiae fuerit generatio per 
coitum } Utrum omnes fuissent nati in sexu masculino } 
Utrum cognitio angeli posset dici matutina et vespertina t 
Utrum martyribus aureola debeatur } Utrum Virgo Ma- 
ria fuerit virgo in concipiendo t Utrum remanserit virgo 
post partum } " 

At last we know a new age came ; and all such questions 
and the mechanical methods of debating them were forgot- 
ten, as even the Saracenic illumination was forgotten, in 
the fresh air and open sunlight of Francis Bacon's discov- 
eries. The Schoolmen always suffer when we compare 
their age with after ages: just as forced children in a pri- 
mary school suffer, when they are compared with free and 
rational collegians. But it is when we compare the tech- 
nical exactness of their methods, with the exactness of the 
methods of others, that we find out how immeasurably su- 
perior they were in knowing their ground, and the extent of 
territory their ground rationally covered. In other words, 
they were a priori experts ; and it is ours to see if, in the 
coming age of inductional processes, — when the tentative 
methods of analogy will prevail over the deductive habits 



38 Essays of To- Day. 



of the past, in law, in medicine, in theology, — the coming 
defenders will know their tools and be able to use them 
with that rigor and artistic touch which marked the age of 
the Schoolmen. With the new age and the new Western 
world, and the new arts and inventions, there came that 
slur upon the past which is the backwater current of a 
strong reaction ; but the technical accuracy of the School- 
men, together with the zeal and courage of the Jesuits, alike 
await to this day their unbiassed Protestant defenders. 

It was the philosopher Boethius who prepared the way 
for the Schoolmen. Beginning, in his " Consolations," with 
the Platonism of Greek thought, he unconsciously worked 
his way to something like the mysticism of a Tauler, which, 
on its religious side, was the craving of a high ideal, and, 
on its Pagan side, was pantheistic absorption. The doc- 
tors who came after him ranked him among Christian 
teachers, and gave him a place by the side of the saints 
and teachers who had appeared in the earlier days of 
Christianity, — very much in the way in which Dante turns 
in his poem from Simon Peter and the Virgin Mary to pi- 
ous yEneas and the poet Virgil. In other words, Boethius 
was the heralding voice which told beforehand of a some- 
thing greater that was to come after. Philosophy became 
the guide to theology : the Monothelite controversy at 
Constantinople in the seventh century, and the rise of 
Mahomet with his fatalism at Mecca, compacted the Chris- 
tian Church into a strong and growing debating-school. 
Based on Aristotle's methods, guided by the philosophic- 
theologic reasoning of Boethius, pressed into shape by the 
autocratic will of Gregory, made firm by the severe dom- 



TJie Age of the Schoohnen. 39 

ination of Augustine over Pelagius, — Christianity, like a 
red-hot metal fresh from the forge, was ready for that ham- 
mering of Charlemagne and Alcuin which gave it the pat- 
tern and the form of Scholasticism. 

Alcuin was a Rugby schoolmaster for the Anglo-Saxon 
boy-mind of the period. The face of Europe was chang- 
ing : monasteries and schools and universities were spring- 
ing up with something of that same forth-putting power 
which makes our own Colorado the inviting union it is of 
Eastern capital and Western enterprise. All the resources 
of thought were the old problems and the old scholastic 
methods ; but even these became living among living men, 
who were blessed with a reserve stock of motive-power. 

Paschasius Radbertus and Godeschalcus were perhaps the 
first-fruits of this age of the Schoolmen. Radbertus, with 
the instinct of the ecclesiastic, found in the mystery of the 
Eucharist the true field for his speculations. He it was 
who watered that plant of the doctrine of the mysterious 
presence of Christ, which finally became definitely labelled 
as the Mass. And it is from his method of argument, that 
the later weapons of to-day, used in defence of this doc- 
trine, have been forged. Godeschalcus, the Saxon, — who 
has been called an earlier Luther, — wrestled with the 
problem of Predestination, and, like Milton*s angels in 
Paradise, — 

" Reasoned high 
Of Providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate, 
Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute ; 
And found no end, in wandering mazes lost." 

But this Schoolman found in Augustine, not the man above 
the doctor, but always the trained expert above the man. 



40 Essays of To-Day. 



He seemed to glory in the spectacle which he pointed out 
of the irresistible waterfall plunge of Islamitic fate, changed 
into Christian terms, and known as Divine Sovereignty. 
He quoted from Augustine to maintain his oneness with 
the views of the past, just as Paschasius quoted from 
Gregory and the early Church to verify his positions in 
the Eucharistic controversy. And when another age came 
on, and the period of the Schoolmen had passed away for 
ever, we behold Calvin at Geneva upon the one side, and 
the theologians of the Council of Trent upon the other, 
resting their opposite systems upon these two scholastic 
piles, — which the heavy weights of logic had driven firmly 
down into the debatable foundations of the past. 

But perhaps the most remarkable man of this period — 
at least of the earlier portion of it — was Johannes Scotus 
Erigena ; as Maurice calls him, " The metaphysician of the 
ninth century, and we conceive one of the acutest meta- 
physicians of any century." It is interesting to us simply 
to call up the names of these great thinkers, these " wrest- 
lers for life and utterers of dogmas ; " with whom perhaps 
we have once been familiar in student-days, and who have 
then been forgotten in the dust of life's journey. In the 
company of Paschasius and Godeschalchus, Hincmar and 
Rabanus Maurus, this man shines out above them all. 

We must distinguish John Scotus Erigena from Duns 
Scotus, who came afterwards, and who was the embodiment 
of all that was intricate and. technical in the system of 
scholasticism. The men of his age little perceived the 
lengths to which his philosophy went, or how his pan- 
theistic premises would be realized in the conclusions of 



The Age of the Schoolmen. 4 1 

modern Germany. Erigena was the undoubted parent of 
speculative scholasticism. Berenger of Tours, in 1045, 
adopted Erigena's philosophy as his own, and was con- 
demned, we know, by a council at Rome, under Leo IX., 
in 1050. Erigena was the master of Charles the Bald's 
famous school of learning, whose seat was in the warrior's 
palace. He travelled east and west, and was acquainted 
alike with the traditions of the Celtic races in Ireland and 
Wales and with the Saracenic lore of Arabia. He was the 
first of that long and strong line of reasoners, ending in the 
person of Sir William Hamilton, who have made philoso- 
phy the interpreter of religion. It is in Guizot's Lectures 
on French Civilization that his character as a metaphy- 
sician is brought before us ; though the drift of his argu- 
ment is to prove that Erigena was after all a Neo-Platonist, 
rather than a Christian philosopher. But Johannes Scotus 
is not the first philosopher who has presented this double 
face. There have been philosophers who have seen in the 
mysticism of John Tauler only pantheism, while others 
have seen in the pantheism of Spinoza a Christian mysti- 
cism. Thus closely do these two worlds often colHde. 

The man was a true Celt, — an Irishman of the very first 
magnitude : quick, witty, intuitive, enriched with the gifts 
and graces of a ready mind, he could turn from the jokes 
at the table of the French King to the metaphysical 
problems of the predestinarian controversy, which was 
then the rage of the thinkers. He rebelled against the 
formal logic of his day, and carried on his arguments 
in the old Platonic manner by imaginary conversations, 
after the style of the " Republic" and the " Gorgias." His 



42 Essays of To-Day. 



great work bore the title of " HepX ^uo-ewv Mepiajjuov,'' — or, 
" The Division of Nature." Maurice, in his " Moral and 
Metaphysical Philosophy," gives a clear description of the 
spirit and scope of this work, which it is useless here to 
quote. 

He shows, among other propositions, that man, created 
in the image of God, is man as a trinity. He makes a 
profoundly Christian application of this fact, of which Brah- 
minical, Buddhistic, Platonical, and Neo-Platonical thinkers 
had spoken. Sex in human nature he attributed to the 
fall of man. The original body of man he affirmed to have 
been spiritual and immortal : its corruption the consequence 
of transgression. Erigena was a Christian Platonist, — a 
believer in the restoration of all things, if indeed the end 
of all things be not Nirvana. Evil is to be brought to an 
end for ever ; death is to be no more ; the redemption by 
Christ has extended to other spheres, and the incarnation 
would have taken place even if man had never sinned. 

The century which opened after that of Erigena shows 
us the Schoolmen hardening their speculations, and narrow- 
ing down to the logical and ecclesiastical methods which 
were becoming the cast-iron windlass whereon every form 
of thought was stretched. The ninth had been a free 
speculative century : the tenth shows us scholasticism be- 
coming ecclesiastically compact and mechanical. Now the 
issue began between a traditional deductive philosophy, 
with its following traditional theology, and the breadth and 
freedom and natural investigations of the Saracenic schools 
in Spain. It was Rome cursing Cordova, and Cordova 
despising Rome. In the eyes of the Roman ecclesiastic, 



The Age of the Schoolmen. 43 

the natural science of the Moslem schools was magic and 
black arts, fouled by the contact of a personal superintend- 
ing devil. The celebrated Gerbert, afterwards known as 
Sylvester II., received his education from Saracenic hands, 
in Spain ; but his enlightenment did not increase his bulk 
of moral power. When he came to the Vatican as Pope, 
he was ambitious only for a restoration of the old pomp 
and greatness of the Roman emperors, not for the advance- 
ment of the new learning. 

It was after the fright about the expected end of the 
world in the year 1000, that the intellectual current began 
to show which way it was tending. This century was like 
a water-shed district in a mountainous country : the streams 
of thought began to show in which direction they were 
turning. Lanfranc, at the Norman monastery of Bee, could 
not long remain hidden from the world, and dukes and 
scholars vied with each other in their many visits to this 
shrine of learning. For it was an age when men were 
wild to know if there was a teacher who could speak with 
a personal authority, and not as the iron-bound scribes. 
But his angry argument with Berengar of Tours, on the 
Eucharistic question of that day, shows a hauteur better 
fitted for the stirring life of ecclesiastical action than the 
unruffled calmness of the cell of an Aquinas ; and he landed 
at last in his true place when he accompanied William of 
Normandy to England, and became the statesman he was 
when he accepted the Archbishopric of Canterbury. 

But if the name of Lanfranc was great in this eleventh 
century, the name of his successor was greater, — as there 
looms up in ecclesiastical history the stalwart figure of 



44 Essays of To-Day. 



Anselm. Born in Lombardy, he became the true Norman- 
Englishman. As Samuel was to Saul, or Nathan to David, 
Anselm at Canterbury was to the impetuous William. A 
man and an ecclesiastic who declared that '* he would rather 
be in hell, if he were pure of sin, than possess the king- 
dom of heaven under the pollution of sin," must have had 
a stormy time in influencing the autocratic Norman duke 
and conqueror of Harold, who was his liege lord and king. 
Yet Anselm was strong enough to hold the king in virtual 
subjection, and to make Canterbury the growing power in 
the politics of Europe it was, all the way up to the fall of 
Becket in the days of Henry H. 

His great work on the atonement, " Cur Deus Homo," 
lives to-day in the history of Christian doctrines ; as is 
plain enough to any who are familiar with the problems of 
Anthropology, as given by Dr. William T. Shedd, in his 
history of Christian doctrines. That he had opponents 
and critics, and reviewers and deniers, is plain enough. 
Gaunilon, a monk, wrote in opposition " A Book on Behalf 
of the Fool," — very much in the style of Archbishop 
Whately's argument against believing in the existence of 
Napoleon Bonaparte. It was meant to break the methods 
of Anselm, and is spicy enough even for the age of the 
Schoolmen. Anselm replied in the spirit of an equal 
combatant ; and then passed on, in order to show his dia- 
lectical skill, to the question whether or not a grammarian 
was a substance ! This was the height of the first period 
in the age of the Schoolmen. 

The twelfth century opened upon the face of European 
civilization with two strong opposite tendencies : the move- 



The Age of the Schoolmen. 45 

ment of the Crusades, and the movement of the Cloister. 
The knights on their horses and the monks in their cells, 
wounded kings and popes in the day of their wrath. Ber- 
nard of Clairvaux and Godfrey of Bouillon in the field of 
action ; the rival orders of the Franciscans and Dominicans 
in the meditative life of the monasteries ; the fierce strife 
of the Nominalist and Realist controversy ; the intellectual 
passage of arms between William of Champeaux and Abe- 
lard at Paris ; the brilliant career of the gifted and unhappy 
Abelard, the great intellectual dictator of his age, — all 
conspire to make this century a striking one in the period 
of the Schoolmen. 

There are few periods in history so attractive and fasci- 
nating as this. The strange, romantic life of Abelard ; his 
scholarly attainments ; his human failings ; the gait of the 
man under the garb of the scholar; his intellectual glory, 
his moral fall ; the tragedy of Heloise, — all unite to invest 
his history with peculiar charms. One cannot help asso- 
ciating the career of Abelard with the romance of Goethe's 
Faust, — since the philosopher and the man of the world 
seem to be so thoroughly blended, and the aspirations of 
the Christian student were so completely lost in the dark- 
ening of the conscience by his fall. His power over the 
masses was marvellous. No building in Paris could hold 
the multitude which flocked to hear him ; and when he 
deserted Paris for his retreats, Paris was deserted by the 
crowds in the streets, and the country places to which 
Abelard retired were filled with attendant strangers. There 
are few incidents in the history of mental passages-at-arms 
so brilliant as that which relates how Abelard, the student 



46 Essays of To-Day. 



and pupil of William of Champeaux at the University of 
Paris, disputed his master and distanced him in every 
intellectual encounter, and finally took the place of the 
chagrined and discomforted logician, whom he had driven 
out of Paris from sheer mortification at his great rival's 
popularity. 

But Peter Abelard as a monk — with the fallen but de- 
voted Heloise as an abbess — regained his old footing of 
influence over the keen French mind of the period. He 
had been great, and he had fallen ; he had been a philos- 
opher, and he had been a sinning man : and now the fact 
that he was a teacher again, with all this bitter experience 
of sin rolled in between his youth and his old age, made 
his later teachings more emphatic than ever. 

His later years were spent in the long controversy over 
Nominalism and Realism, which subject became the great 
bone of contention for an entire century. His long dis- 
cussion of the problem whether the universal is only " resl' 
a thing, or " nomeii',' a name, is illustrated by his chapter, 
" De Socratis — Destructione," in which the specific differ- 
ence between the attributes of genera and species is power- 
fully brought out. His " Sic et Non " — " Yes and No " — 
is another of his theological sketches. In this treatise, 
he shows that, by doubting, the human mind, comes to in- 
quiry, and by inquiry it arrives at truth. Christ, in the 
Temple sitting with the doctors, hearing them and ask- 
ing them questions, was to his mind the picture of the 
human learner, with a divine inspiration urging him on 
in his doubt and search in his oft-repeated " Yes " and 
"No." 



TJie Age of the Schoolmen. 47 

The boldness and dash of Abelard — together with his 
broad generalizations, in which Christ or Aristotle were 
quoted, only when each would count one on his side — was 
met by the teachings of Hugo de St Victor, the head of 
the Mystic school. Ecclesiasticism into Rationalism, Ra- 
tionalism into Mysticism, sacramentalism into dogma- 
tism, dogmatism into speculation, unchecked speculation 
into the intuitional philosophy, — this has always been the 
trend of the world's way of thinking. 

After William of Champeaux came Abelard, with his 
two-edged sword of breadth, which cut in the twofold way, 
" Sic et Non," — " Yes and No ; " and after Abelard comes 
Hugo the Mystic. 

Hugo carried on, in its original integrity of purpose, the 
school which William of Champeaux had founded at Paris, 
unmoved by the fickle populace, which had in turn ap- 
plauded and condemned, and applauded again. In his 
" Didascalon," he strove to reconcile the old scholastic 
method of inquiry with practical piety, and was opposed 
to those quizzing, itching, conundrum-like subtleties which 
were then in fashion. Every great movement or awaken- 
ing period, and every new stimulus upon our energies, 
breaks into one of two lines : either into the life of further 
study and retirement, or into the arena of immediate action. 
After Abelard, came, on the one hand, the cell-like introspec- 
tion of Hugo the Mystic ; and, on the other hand, the strug- 
gling political efforts of Arnold of Brescia. It is difficult 
to find out always the exact relationship of one thing to 
another, though we know an unseen relationship exists. 
What Abelard's brilliant but puzzling speculations in the- 



48 Essays of To-Day. 



ology at Paris had to do with Arnold's scheme for restoring 
the senate and tribunes to Rome, and making it a Chris- 
tian repubUc, it is difficult for us to find out. But inspira- 
tion works ia zigzag paths, like the uncertain currents of 
the forked lightning ; and it is hard to tell just where it 
will strike. " Oh, that I could know more ! " is the cry 
of those who receive the impress of their inspiration as 
knowledge. " Oh, that I could do more ! " is the cry of 
those who find their outlet in the world of action. 

And in this double way, the life and influence and in- 
spiration of the great Abelard worked outwards. Hugo de 
St. Victor led the way back from the world of strife to 
the life of meditation, and a pious, devotional settlement of 
those questions which had been so rudely knocked to and 
fro in the controversies which had preceded him ; while 
Arnold carried his inspiration down into the seething 
political world, and began to connive with the Emperor 
Frederick Barbarossa to help him in his efforts with the 
people of Rome against the Pope. 

His name is linked with that long band of Italian patriots 
and dreamers, — Dante, Tasso, Savonarola, Rienzi, Cavour, 
Mazzini, and Garibaldi ; but the inspiration which made 
Arnold of Brescia a political martyr came from Abelard 
the Schoolman. 

St. Bernard has always been looked upon as the great 
orthodox champion of the solid truth against the specula- 
tive whimsicalities of Abelard. But Bernard was too much 
a man of the busy world, with a dozen irons in the fire at 
the same time, to be contrasted against Abelard, as the 
Athanasius of the period against another Arius. Abelard's 



TJie Age of the Schoolmen. 49 

nominalism was a stronger branch than that of Roscellin, 
whose so-called heretical views seem to have died with the 
death of their author. Bernard, a busy churchman, deep 
in plans and purposes with dukes and nobles, was no fit 
judge of the man whom he condemned ; and the Council 
of Sens, before which Abelard refused to make any de- 
fence, — and which has come down through history with 
a very grave suspicion hanging over it as to its sobriety, 
— was, after all, only a packed tribunal, a drumhead court- 
martial, whose verdict, given among jeers and drunken 
cries, was a foregone conclusion. And thus, under the 
Pope's condemnation, the broken-down Abelard retired to 
the tender care of Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Clugny, 
and died in peace in the year 1 142. 

As we look over the face of Europe at this time, we 
perceive the character and influence of the schools and 
universities which had struggled into being. Bologna, 
with its school of jurists for the elucidation of Roman 
law ; Paris, with its theological University ; and Oxford 
and Cambridge in England, — became the centres to which 
men of thought and literary aspirations flocked. The 
Englishmen — Robert Pulleyn, John of Salisbury, Alex- 
ander of Hales, and Roger Bacon — became noted on the 
Continent for their learning and ability, and threw an 
aureole of light around the fast-rising University of Ox- 
ford. This latter doctor, with his famous English name, 
was the forerunner of the coming age, which was to be 
so well known through the new philosophy of his great 
namesake. Like his successor, Francis Bacon, he inves- 
tigated physical science, and thereby drew upon himself 

4 



50 . Essays of To-Day . 



the suspicion of magic ; and underwent both a popular 
condemnation as a wizard and student in the black art, and 
at the hands of his fellow-Franciscan friars, and finally by 
the Pope himself. There is that strong English common- 
sense, in every thing this man writes, which has always 
made English Catholicism so very different from Ultra- 
montanism, and whose finest representative is found in her 
latest convert of all, — John Henry Newman. 

Roger Bacon denounced the idea that philosophy and 
theology can be opposed to each other. True philosophy, 
he maintained, was included in the wisdom of God. His 
whole career is a striking example of the troubles which 
awaited those who asked questions out of the conventional 
line, and who sought for originality beyond the system of 
scholasticism. 

Peter Lombard, who preceded Bacon, is another writer 
of this age of the Schoolmen whom we must briefly con- 
sider, since '' The Sentences," which he wrote, has become 
a standard work of theology. Robertson writes of this 
work: "A service like that which Gratian had rendered 
to ecclesiastical law was performed for theology by Peter 
Lombard, a native of Novara ; who, after having long 
taught with great reputation at Paris, became Bishop of 
that city in 1159. The name of 'Sentences' had before 
been given to the collections of ancient authorities, which 
had been popular since the seventh century. Such a col- 
lection of opinions had been formed by Abelard, under the 
title of ' Yes and No,' with a view of exhibiting their con- 
tradictions ; but Peter Lombard, on the contrary, in his 
* Four Books of Sentences,' aimed at harmonizing them. 



The Age of the Schoolmen. 5 I 

He discusses questions down to those raised by Abelard. 
. . . The method which was observed in the work gave it 
the charm of novelty, while in substance it was intended 
to accord with antiquity ; and it speedily obtained a great 
popularity." All the ecclesiastical historians stop and rest 
when they arrive at Peter Lombard. " The Sentences " 
was indeed the work of the Schoolman of the Schoolmen. 
The early Christian Fathers and Apologists are all put into 
the scholastic solution of syllogism ; and Augustine and 
Basil and Gregory all reappear, crystallized with a technical 
encrusting of logic, which reminds one of the sophomore's 
logical practicings upon the family during the winter holi- 
days. This is the criticism of Maurice : " It was a very 
critical moment in the history of European culture, not 
altogether unlike the one in individual life when the boy 
leaves the school-forms for a more elaborate and systematic 
course of instruction. . . . Peter Lombard belonged to 
what we may call the University age, — an age which had 
not begun in the days of Anselm, and which underwent 
^great changes, if it may not be said to have passed into 
another, before the days of Aquinas." 

After the career of Peter Lombard, and the circulation 
of'his "Sentences," the universities began to feel the influ- 
ence of the two great orders of the age, — the Franciscan 
and the Dominican. The rise of the mendicant orders 
showed that a new life was coming to the surface, and that 
common-sense was struggling with the intellectual con- 
juring of the hour. Christianity must mean life, — not 
alone thought. 

With the advent of the thirteenth century came a new 



52 Essays of To- Day. 



peril, which almost destroyed the structure of scholasticism. 
Aristotle, the great syllogistic trellis over which their doc- 
trinal speculations ran, was used by Averroes and the other 
Arabian sages. Aristotle, it w^as found, could be used in 
defence of the Koran, as formerly he had been used in the 
support of Christianity. Popes and cardinals frowned ! 
Cordova w^as using the very weapons of Rome ! Some- 
thing must be done : scholasticism must be condemned ! — 
when suddenly the old reasoned-out doctrine of the Incar- 
nation, which had been an intricate rebus with Peter Lom- 
bard, became the great practical belief of the Franciscan 
friars ; and thus these very mendicants, by the practical 
turn they gave to the discussions of the day, became the 
unconscious protectors of learning and the saviors of 
society. 

Then, when the tide was turned, — when Christianity 
practical, phis Aristotle, prevailed over Islamism, and the 
danger from the Saracenic renaissance was a thing of the 
past, — the later Schoolmen, more confident than ever in 
the strength of their position, appeared. John of Salisbury, 
and Roger Bacon, who chronologically belong to this second 
set, have already been mentioned. 

The entire range of the Schoolmen, beginning with 
Boethius, — half Pagan, half Christian, — logically ended 
with Raymond Lully and Dante, — half Catholic, half Prot- 
estant. Raymond, in his mission among the Mahometans, 
in which he suffered martyrdom ; and Dante, in his exile- 
ship from Florence, and his flights into the other world, — 
ended, with their iconoclastic lives, this long stretch of the 
syllogistic period. For, look at the changed world ! Amer- 



The Age of the Schoolmen. 53 

ica was to be opened ; the Reformation was to dawn ; the 
printing-press was at hand, — and thus, in the fulness of 
the times, the dusty parchments and folios of these doctors 
were to be laid by at last upon the shelves of the past. 

But, before we close, we must notice this second group 
of Schoolmen ; for they stood, after all, at the height of 
the glory of this age. The first of these teachers, in this 
second group, was Albertus Magnus. In his zeal to restore 
Aristotle to his former position of headship, he studied 
most carefully his Saracenic expositors. So closely was 
he allied to the system of the old Greek philosopher, and 
so careful was he not to depart from his maxims and modes 
of expression, that he was called by those who came after 
him "the Ape of Aristotle." Albert stands to his great 
successor Aquinas in something of the relationship of Am- 
brose to Augustine. Albert, though a Dominican monk, 
established a coterie of students at Cologne, among whom 
was a certain youth, whose stolid face and fixed expression 
induced his fellow-students to call him " the Ox." " That 
ox," replied Albert, '* will make his lowings heard through- 
out Christendom." And this is the way in which Thomas 
Aquinas was first known to the world. 

Albert studied at Paris, and gloried in being considered 
the teacher and helper of Aquinas, before whose rising 
glory he was unselfishly willing to pale. Though made 
Bishop of Ratisbon, Albert never forgot the strictness of 
his mendicant vows ; he never outgrew his fatherly love for 
Aquinas, and his delight in his acknowledged greatness. 
Albert felt himself called upon to master the philosophical 
problems of the day. The story is, that the Virgin sec- 



54 Essays of To- Day. 



onded his efforts and approved of his resolution, and prom- 
ised him her assistance : telling him, however, that an hour 
would come when her help would be taken from him, and 
he would be again a child. 

Years afterwards, when he was an old man, on his way 
to Lyons to attend a council there, he became conscious, 
by some vision of second-sight, that Aquinas was dying 
at that moment. The event proved true ; and soon after- 
wards, in the midst of a discourse, his mind left him, — his 
memory was gone : the sign of the Virgin was fulfilled, and 
his career was over. He died at Cologne, in 1280. 

Albertus Magnus knew a great deal, upon many sub- 
jects, — ethics, metaphysics, physics, Platonism, nominal- 
ism, realism, mathematics, theology, and ontology; and 
his life and writings show us the result of scattering 
one's powers instead of condensing them. Broadening out 
upon many things, he became diffusive ; while Aquinas 
strove for the specialty of theology, and condensed his life 
and efforts in that greatest of all theological works, the 
" Summa Theologia." 

A knowledge of the life of Thomas Aquinas we must 
assume as the common property of Christendom. Every 
student of Church history is familiar with its brevity and 
its intensity. Dying at the early age of forty-eight, — when 
one looks at the mass of writings which he has left behind, 
the saying of his master, Albert, seems to be true, that he 
had " put an end to all labor, even to the world's end." 

Robertson tells us that, "at the Council of Trent, nearly 
three hundred years after his death, the ' Summa ' was 
placed on the secretary's desk, beside the Holy Scriptures, 



The Age of the Schoolmen, 5 5 

as containing the orthodox solution of all theological ques- 
tions." He was canonized in 1323, and has, from that day 
on, been held in peculiar regard in the Roman CathoUc 
Church, as ranking next after the four great doctors of the 
West. He is continually spoken of as the ** angelical 
doctor," or simply the " Angelical." Dr. Vaughan's life 
of Thomas Aquinas — before referred to — is by far the 
clearest and fullest story of his life and times which has 
ever appeared. One can understand why a Roman Cath- 
olic author, such as this, glows with enthusiasm over the 
marvellous details of such a life ; and he is a poor pedant 
who cannot join hands with his brethren of the Roman 
communion in rejoicing over this man, whom the King of 
all souls seems to have delighted to honor. 

" Thou hast written well of me, Thomas : what reward 
wilt thou receive for thy labor } " These are the words of 
Christ to Thomas on his dying bed, according to the legend 
of his death. 

" Lord," he answered, " I desire no other than thyself ! " 

One cannot read the life of this man without feeling that 
it shows a silent stock of reserve power, which marks the 
life with that same divine emphasis which we see in Augus- 
tine, or Francis Xavier, or Ignatius Loyola. The life spoke 
through the mind : not the mind alone by its own specula- 
tions. We pass over the conundrums of the " Summa," 
and the rebus-like questionings of the speculative atmos- 
phere of the day, and rest in the powerful grasp which the 
Divine Mind made upon this nature, and which this nature 
made in return upon the world. 

What Thomas was to the Dominicans, Duns Scotus was 



56 Essays of To- Day. 



to the Franciscans. Francis, Alexander of Hales, Bona- 
ventura, Duns Scotus, Roger Bacon, — these were the 
lights of the Franciscan Order, and this was the order in 
which they came. All the philosophy of this thirteenth 
century is found in the two rival orders, — the Dominicans 
and the Franciscans. Thomas Aquinas was the acknowl- 
edged leader among the Dominicans. Bonaventura, and 
after him the erratic Duns, were the great teachers among 
the Franciscans. John of Fidanza — otherwise known by 
his conventual name of Bonaventura — was the represent- 
ative of the meditative Franciscan, absorbed in devotion 
to the Virgin Mary, lost in the worship of the crucifix, and 
merged in the Nirvana of a perpetual seance of the Cath- 
olic infinite. His moral philosophizings all take a mystico- 
ecclesiastical turn. It is told of him that when Aquinas, 
on a visit to him, inquired for an opportunity of witnessing 
the books from which he had acquired so much learning, 
Bonaventura replied by pointing to a crucifix, — for Bona- 
ventura was, after all, only a mild and meditative Italian. 
The other man. Duns Scotus, was the fighter. He was 
from Ireland. Ill luck betides his name ! The name 
" Duns " is said by some to be taken from the place of his 
birth, — Dunse, in Scotland. John Duns Scotus, "the 
subtle doctor," is his common name and title. Richardson 
says in his dictionary that the word Dunce "was first in- 
troduced by the Thomists, or disciples of Thomas Aquinas, 
in contempt towards their antagonists, the Scotists, or dis- 
ciples of Duns Scotus, or John Scot of Dunse." Trench, in 
his " Study of Words," says : " At the revival of learning, 
some still clung to these old Schoolmen, and to one in 



The Age of the Schoolmen. 57 

particular, — Duns Scotus, the great teacher of the Fran- 
ciscan Order ; and many times an adherent of the old 
learning would seek to strengthen his position by an 
appeal to its great doctor, familiarly called lOuns : while 
the others would contemptuously rejoin, 'Oh, you are a 
Dunsman ! ' or, more briefly, * You are a Duns ! ' or, ' This 
is a piece of Duncery ! ' and inasmuch as the new learn- 
ing was ever enlisting more and more of the genius and 
scholarship of the age on its side, the title became more 
and more a term of scorn." 

Born in an Irish village, studying in Paris, educated at 
Oxford, the brilliant Celt appeared as a Patrick Redivivus, 
to drive out all the snakes of heresy, and to introduce a 
new race of speculative inhabitants. He fought the Do- 
minicans, with their Augustinian tenets, and boldly avowed 
his Pelagian views as to man's state by the Fall. At the 
same time, he far exceeded Bonaventura, his predecessor, in 
his zeal for the Virgin Mary, — maintaining the doctrine of 
the immaculate conception in an argument of two hundred 
distinct propositions. He led a brief but stirring life ; and 
his death is lost in tradition. One of his followers, making 
a vile pun, declares that all about his life was " Scotus :" 
cr/coT09, — darkness. It certainly was enveloped in obscurity. 
Some maintain that he lived to be an old man of ninety ; 
but the most of his chroniclers declare that he died at the 
disputed age of thirty-two, or thirty-five, or forty. The 
Franciscans of course exalted him. The jealous Domin- 
icans detracted from him. Eventually, Thomas Aquinas 
became the sole authority of the latter order ; while, after 
the death of Duns Scotus, it was decided in the councils 



58 Essays of To-Day . 



of the Franciscans that the decisions of the " subtle doc- 
tor" should be their final authority. 

A Dominican detractor tells the story of Duns's death, 
as follows : For some awful crime, known only to God, 
while at Cologne he was allowed to fall into a swoon, and 
to be buried alive ; and that he died in his struggles to 
burst open the lid of his coffin. 

" Yes," replies a Franciscan admirer ; ** he died in a 
state of rapture ; and his body couldn't help breaking the 
coffin-lid ! " 

Duns Scotus left more written works of the abstrusest' 
kind than any other Schoolman. Subtle, as an Irishman 
only can know subtlety, — the master of the technical 
weapons of the age, — this man marked the high-water 
line of scholasticism, and banked-up on the side of the 
old learning, those intrenchments which we still look at, 
as a curiosity of by-gone modes of warfare. For, after 
him, came Roger Bacon, who died just in time to save 
himself from being burned ; and then came the Lollards, 
and Wickliffe, and the new age and the new tongue, — 
and the age of the Schoolmen was over. 

Taine's final criticism of this period we may remember ; 
let us, however, recall it : " These young and valiant minds 
thought they had found the Temple of Truth ; they rushed 
at it headlong, in legions, — breaking in the doors, clam- 
bering over the walls, leaping into the interior, — and so 
found themselves at the bottom of a moat. Three cen- 
turies of labor, at the bottom of this black moat, added not 
one idea to the human mind. They seem to be marchings 
hit are mei'ely marking time. People would say, to see 



TJie Age of the Schoolmen. 59 

them moil and toil, that they will educe from heart and 
brain some great, original creed ; and yet all belief was 
imposed upon them from the outset. The system was 
made : they could only arrange and comment upon it." 

With a new world discovered ; with new inventions and 
fresh instruments of power, both mechanical and mental, 
at hand ; with the rise of the people, and the dawn of the 
Reformation, — the world has turned from the age of the 
Schoolmen, as from some once-petted child, grown garru- 
lous with premature old age, and paralyzed at that very 
period when the greatest strength should appear. 

We call it a dark epoch, — and it was dark out of doors ; 
but it was bright enough within. In the universities and 
schools for the few, the shuttle of thought flew back and 
forth with a marvellous skill and rapidity ; but the people 
were unreformed, the masses were untouched, and there 
was no leverage found by which to raise them. Hence 
these abrupt chasms between knowledge and ignorance : 
hence these extremes of light and darkness. 

The age of the Schoolmen was, on its philosophical side, 
the last effort of technical deduction. The decisions of 
the scholastic jurists, as quoted to-day in our common-law, 
show us this. These jurists were all deductive experts ; 
they never invented any new lines of arriving at a conclu- 
sion. Analogy was unknown ; the inductive method was 
considered " Dangerous passing : town not liable ; " and 
thus the old iteration went endlessly on. 

On its theological side, however, the age of the School- 
men was the last effort of asceticism to capture Chris- 
tianity. We see this in the way in which the rival 



6o Essays of To- Day. 



mendicant orders — the Franciscans and Dominicans — 
absorbed all the mental, moral, and spiritual forces of the 
period. Every thought and feeling and act which was of 
any worth, or which had any life in it, was ruthlessly swept, 
as by some mammoth fan, over the smooth barn-floor of 
the period, into the yawning hopper of the scholastic in- 
strument, where the ponderous millstones kept grinding 
every species of grain into oneness of flour. 

But when the new age came, with its new world, and 
its new tongue, and its new inventive spirit, the old conun- 
drums and the old ways of finding out the puzzles satisfied 
no longer ; for Christianity, like Christ the Teacher, was 
past the period when the boy-mind was busy with the doc- 
tors, *' both hearing them and asking them questions." 

The Age of the Schoolmen is past. Yet now and 
then a loiterer in the temple appears, longing for the old 
methods. Jonathan Edwards was the Schoolman of Pu- 
ritanism ; but where are his followers to-day t For " if 
any man speak in an unknown tongue, let one interpret. 
But if there be no interpreter, let him keep silence in the 
church ; and let him speak to himself, and to God" (i Cor. 
xiv. 2^, 28). 



Savo7iarola. 6 1 



III. 

SAVONAROLA. 

np^HERE are certain places in the world which affect 
us in the way that some old strain of music does, as 
it brings the light of other days around us. We always 
associate the music and the place together : the one in- 
variably suggests the other. Florence is one of these 
marked places. . We always think of Dante and Tasso 
and Savonarola, when we think of that charming city. 
There is Dante's empty tomb, for his body still reposes 
at Ravenna ; and there is Savonarola's cell, and Tasso's 
home, — and their checkered history is indissolubly linked 
with that of the fair city itself. There has always been 
something strangely suggestive about Italian Reformers. 
They have loved their country with a Southern vehemence 
which, for the most part, has insured for them while living 
the fiercest persecution ; but when they have passed away, 
the sons of those who stoned the prophets seem as if they 
could not gather costly stones enough with which to honor 
their once banished names. As Lord Byron says in Childe 
Harold, — 

"Ungrateful Florence! Dante sleeps afar, 
Like Scipio, buried by the upbraiding shore ; 
Thy factions in their worse than civil war 
Proscribed the bard, whose name for evermore 
Their children's children would in vain adore, 
With the remorse of ages ! " 



Essays of To-Day. 



There is no one who did more for his native city and 
his national church than the great rehgioiis and poUtical 
reformer, Savonarola ; and there is no one who suffered 
greater indignities at the hands of his fellow-citizens than 
he. His native historians and his own letters have por- 
trayed to posterity his strange character and career ; 
and the greatest of living novelists, in one of her most 
striking works, has painted for us, in a Shakspearian man- 
ner, the person and surroundings of Savonarola as seen 
through the history of Romola. Tito Melema in his Greek 
atheistic selfishness, the old Father in his richer philo- 
sophical Paganness, Romola in her aspirations after truth 
and duty, and the impassioned Friar with his visions and 
revelations from the Lord, all help to make very true and 
very vivid the varied personnelle of the period. 

The elements found in the Florence of Savonarola's 
history are exactly those of George Eliot's story. Lorenzo 
de Medici was then at the height of his fame and power, 
when Savonarola came to Florence. Fetes, dances, mas- 
querades, and tournaments occupied continually the gay 
and restless thoughts of the Florentines. The past of 
liberty and all the State troubles seemed to be forgotten 
in the deliciousness of Epicureanism. It was like the 
Rome of Augustus, — full of past heroisms and present 
sensuous delights. The towers of the palaces, and the 
rich mellifluous bells that in other days called the hostile 
clans of the city to their rallying points for the street con- 
flict, now only rang forth the invitation to the dance or the 
Saturnalia. Lorenzo, with the wits and artists who lived 
in the smile of his favors, honored art and culture in all 



Savonarola. G^ 



its forms, and did his utmost to make Florence the gay 
metropoHs of Europe, as Napoleon III. so effectually did 
with Paris. Women were versed in Latin and Greek ; 
questions of architecture, painting, music, sculpture, were 
the familiar topics of conversation in the streets ; and all 
Florence was one broad belt of connoisseurship. Artists 
were petted and wheedled in the way in which popular 
actors are treated now-a-days. Poets were honored, and 
philosophers dealt out their neat and popular little sys- 
tems in an elegant and finished manner. The tradition- 
alism of the Church bound the leaders of the State to 
the old regime of Papal Rome ; but religion at the best 
was a thing of ceremonial form, and was, to those who 
thought most upon the subject, an open question. The 
remark of Pope Leo X., that, " after all, the fable about 
Jesus Christ was a grand stairway to power," described 
completely the opinion of the Medicean Court. They 
clung to the hierarchy of Rome as one of the established 
facts of the period : but it was only taken because it was 
found ready to hand ; not because it or its teachings were 
in any way believed. 

Into this cultured but corrupt city of Florence, given 
up to the idolatry of art, and with no true belief in the 
outlying doctrines of Christianity, the young Savonarola 
came. 

Lorenzo reigned from the year 1469 to 1492, and Savo- 
narola first appeared in public as a preacher and reforming 
prophet in the year 1482, — ten years before the discovery 
of America by Columbus. He was the third of seven 
children, and was early devoted by his admiring parents 



64 Essays of To-Day . 



to the service of the State and the profession of arms. 
At Ferrara, his native place, he witnessed the celebrated 
military pageants of his- time, — especially a very cele- 
brated reception to the then reigning Pope Pius II., better 
known in history as ^neas Piccolomini. But his mind 
was not in his surroundings and their sensuous splendor. 
Already he had read Plato and Aristotle, and that master 
of Christian philosophy, Thomas Aquinas. A brief but 
intense passion for a black-eyed Florentine girl, a daughter 
of a noble family, which ended in a rejected suit, drove 
him finally to that step which but for his secret love he 
would have taken before, and he ran away from his father's 
house and entered the convent of St. Dominic, at Bologna. 
Here he remained for seven years, refusing every entreaty 
from his ambitious parents to go back again to the gay 
world, and working his way from the most menial avo- 
cations of the conventual life to the highest position of 
influence. Never did Moses in the desert, or St. Paul 
in Arabia, ponder over his life's call more intensely and 
devoutly than did Savonarola in his seven years' novitiate. 
His fastings and prayers were the wonder of the con- 
vent. He could be seen, hour after hour, walking up and 
down the cloister way ; moving like a shadow, rapt in 
inward meditation, until at times it was supposed he was 
in a trance. In appearance, he was of a dark complexion, 
of middle stature, with a nervous sensitive temperament. 
His piercing eyes were overarched by heavy black eye- 
brows. The medallions and pictures represent him with 
the thick curved lips so common among Italian ecclesi- 
astics, and with a hooked and peaked nose and heavy 



Savonarola. 65 



tattoo-like lines along the face, like the face of Dante, — 
partly feminine, and partly of a general unsatisfied aspect. 
If genius, as it has been said, impresses upon the face of 
a man something of the feminine type of countenance, and 
if Nature never throws away a nose, — then Savonarola 
had in his appearance the feminineness of genius, and that 
nose which never takes its place upon the human face in 
vain. There is a picture of John Henry Newman which 
resembles to some degree the peculiar features of this 
Italian monk. The curved lips, the hooked nose, the 
womanly lines of the face — somehow with a motherly 
look about it — are common to them both. 

In 1482, after having gone about the neighborhood of 
Ferrara to preach, the* young monk was sent to Florence, 
and settled at the convent of St. Mark. Here for the 
first time since his youth and his love-troubles, he touched 
the giddy world of Italy again. Lorenzo de Medici was 
still on the crest of popularity ; art was still every thing to 
the people ; the aesthetic philosophy of the period still loved 
to bandy back and forth the opposite systems of Realism 
and Nominalism, — of spirit and of matter, as represented 
by Plato and Aristotle. The crimes of the Popes — the 
simony and nepotism and shameless immoralities, which 
culminated in the monstrous career of Alexander Borgia — 
were already familiar subjects to the circles of the elite. 

If ever there was a need in the history of the world 
for a prophet and a reformer, this was the age and time, 
given over entirely as it was to Italian immorality, gilded 
Vv'ith the Parisian-like culture of Pagan sentiment and art. 
Here he found even the preachers mere court rhetori- 

5 



66 Essays of To-Day 



cians, versed in the arts of pleasing their audiences, but 
without any actual belief in the verities of their faith, or 
the necessity of their ethics. Few of the priests ever 
read the Bible, because the Latin was incorrect. Cardinal 
Bembo wrote to a certain student, " Do not read St. Paul's 
Epistles, that such a barbarous style may not corrupt your 
tastes." These court flatterers, like the clergy of Thacke- 
ray's stories of Queen Anne's reign, lived in the smile and 
favor of the reigning house, and seemed to care naught for 
any higher power. When Savonarola first began to preach 
at Florence, he was laughed at by the wealthy ecclesias- 
tics as a scatter-brained fanatic. Even the members of his 
order tried in vain to induce him to change his style, and 
told him he could never expect to rival the famous Gen- 
nezzano, the idol of Florence, whose every sentence was 
a study and a marvel of elegance and grace. To this the 
young monk replied, " Elegance of language must give way 
before simplicity, in preaching the truth." It was in the 
Lent of i486 that he first startled the people of Lombardy, 
through whose towns he was sent out to preach, by taking 
up as the subject of his sermons the war-cry of Church re- 
form : "The Church will be scourged and then regenerated, 
and this quickly." This was his motto, — his oft-recurring 
prophecy. He made the history of the Hebrews,, in their 
successive sins and rebellions and punishments, the type 
and image of corrupt and rebellious Italy ; and he declared 
the avenging hand of the Almighty would very speedily 
show itself. 

Soon after this, at Brescia, where he had been picturing 
to the crowds which flocked to hear him the impending 



Savonarola. 6'j 



ruin of that city, as foretold in the prophetic imagery of the 
Revelation of St. John, the cruel soldiers of the marauding 
Gaston de Foix — a perfect wild boar of Ardennes, such 
as Scott describes in *' Quentin Durward " — butchered six 
thousand persons in the streets. Then the fame of Savo- 
narola — the prophet of the Lord, the reformer of morals, 
the priest of righteousness — spread far and near, and all 
Italy wanted to see and hear this revived Elijah and do 
him homage. 

About this time it was that he met, at a conference of 
friends and philosophers and literati, the celebrated Prince 
Pico, — a marvel of intellectual attainment, — and formed 
a life-long attachment to this young, pure-minded noble. 
At his urgent solicitation, Lorenzo recalled Savonarola to 
Florence, just as he would have brought some curious 
specimen of art from Egypt or Greece ; and from that 
day the pulpit of the great Duomo was the monk's ros- 
trum. Plato was put aside ; the immoral frivolities were 
kept decently out of sight ; the court preachers took up 
their books of rhetoric and went to more congenial quar- 
ters ; and Savonarola, in effect, ruled Florence, through 
the teachings of the pulpit. The preaching of the period 
was of two kinds. 

First, there were the stately rhetoricians of the court, 
who were the personification of courtly elegance; and, 
secondly, there were the grotesque preachers of the mar- 
ket-place, who preached to the crowds after the melo- 
dramatic manner of the miracle-plays. 

When Savonarola became Prior of St. Mark's, and 
preached at the Duomo, the power of both these other 



6S Essays of To- Day. 



extremes passed away, and they were forgotten and un- 
heeded in the all-prevailing moral earnestness of the re- 
called Dominican. 

It was about this time that he wrote his principal tracts 
and dissertations, and brought to light his confused and 
metaphysical system of interpreting the Scriptures. By 
his peculiar system of Biblical exegesis, he found in almost 
every passage of Scripture four methods of interpretation : 
the spiritual, the moral, the allegorical, and the anagogical. 

Villari, in his explanation of Savonarola's system, says : 

" For instance, let us take the first verse in Genesis : ' In the 
beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.' The spiritual 
sense here refers to the spirit; hence heaven and earth signify 
soul and body. The moral sense in its turn refers to morals ; 
hence heaven and earth meant reason and instinct. The allegori- 
cal sense had a double meaning. It refers to the history of the 
Hebrew Church or the Christian Church. In the first sense, 
heaven and earth represented Adam and Eve ; the sun and the 
earth signified the high-priest and the king of the Hebrew people. 
In the second sense, they signified the elected people and the 
people of the Gentiles, — the Pope and the Emperor. The ana- 
gogical, or higher mysterious sense, refers to the Church trium- 
phant : and hence heaven, earth, sun, moon, and stars signified 
the angels, men, Jesus Christ, the Virgin, the Saints, &c." 

In this way, Savonarola found in the Bible a confirma- 
tion of all the thoughts, all the inspirations, all the proph- 
ecies that arose in his own mind. 

But the great work of his life was his defence of the 
Christian religion, known as " The Triumph of the Cross." 
This book is one of the wonders of religious literature. 
That a Dominican monk in the period of the Middle Ages 



Savonarola, 69 



should conceive such a defence of Christianity, without 
building it upon the traditionalism of past authority, is a 
wonder ; and that it should be written in a style which 
makes it appear as a work of to-day, without any of the 
cumbrous pedantry or artificialness of the times, is a 
greater wonder still. It is unlike Savonarola's times, and 
unlike his other writings. But it was the darling work 
of his life, and was only finished a short time before his 
death. 

It consists of four books : the first contends for the 
existence of God and the soul's immortality; the second 
maintains the distinctively Christian doctrines of the 
Church ; the third defends the reasonableness of Christi- 
anity with the soul's ulterior belief in God ; and the fourth 
is devoted to the subject of the ecclesiastical system as 
the exponent of existing Christian power. It is a sort of 
Butler's ''Analogy " before the time of Bishop Butler. 

By this time, through the fostering care of Cosmo and 
Pietro and Lorenzo de Medici, Florence had become a 
revived Athens. Savans from the East had brought from 
the ruins of Constantinople, before it yielded to the Turks, 
the choice treasures of that city. It was said that all that 
now was wanting was the statues of the gods ; and that 
e;ven these Lorenzo was seriously thinking of establishing 
by a ducal decree. But just then word came from Sa- 
vonarola, in the convent of St. Mark, saying, " Beware ! " 
and Lorenzo took the hint and desisted from his plan. 

After this there came a break between them ; and Sa- 
vonarola refused to go through the ceremony of asking 
for the Duke's favor; declaring that he had received his 



70 Essays of To-Day. 



office from God, not from Lorenzo. Then followed honors, 
gifts, offers of money, position, every thing, in fact, an 
ecclesiastic's ambition could crave, provided the Prior of 
St. Mark's would not aim such merciless shafts from the 
pulpit at the reigning House, or foretell such a gloomy 
future. Savonarola's only reply to the distinguished em- 
bassy was : " Tell your master to repent of his sins, and 
not to think about my banishment ; for though I am a 
poor stranger and he a great duke, I shall remain and he 
must soon depart." 

Very soon after this Lorenzo was taken sick ; and on 
his death-bed sent for Savonarola, to make his confession 
to him, and receive the monk's absolution. Savonarola 
demanded of him three things : — 

First, he must have a decided faith in Jesus Christ. 
This Lorenzo said he had. 

Second, he must give back those things which he had 
unjustly gained. This he said he would do, — putting it 
down in his will. 

Thirdly, said the monk, you must restore to Florence her 
republican liberties. This the dying man was unprepared 
to do ; and so, turning from him, Savonarola went back to 
his convent, and the miserable Lorenzo died unabsolved. 

The news of Savonarola's prophecy of Lorenzo's death 
spread like wild-fire among the restless, superstitious Ital- 
ians ; and he became an acknowledged prophet of the times. 
During this period, he had been working most earnestly to 
reform the monastic system and the general condition of 
the Church. This brought him face to face with the ex- 
isting state of affairs in the government ; and in this way 



Savonarola, 7 1 



it happened that his calendar of reform spread outward 
from the reformation of the monastery to the Florentine 
State. The Florence of the fifteenth century was the 
great metropolis of Italy. Merchant-princes and bankers 
made it the great business centre of the world ; and the 
clustering associations of the fine arts and literature, as 
we have seen, gave it a leading position among the great 
educational centres of Europe. The government at the 
close of the fourteenth century was democratic in char- 
acter, and consisted of a council of three hundred men. 
There were two classes, — the Signori and the Gonfalo- 
nier!. These met in the public palace of the people, 
with their president at their head. This simple, easy man- 
ner of popular government, however, had by degrees given 
way under the gradual rise of the Medicean family, and an 
informal but practical dukedom had taken its place. This 
autocracy had been suffered under Giovanni and Coruno 
de Medici, and the brilliancy and splendor of Lorenzo's 
rule made the people forget their inherent democratic lib- 
erties. This is what Savonarola meant, when he demanded 
as the third condition of Lorenzo's confession, before ab- 
solution could be granted him, that he should restore to 
Florence her liberties. 

Lorenzo was succeeded by his son Pietro, an ambitious, 
uncultured ruler, whose one aim seemed to be to join 
Florence to some of the other surrounding dukedoms, or 
to Naples, and thus to swell himself up into the propor- 
tions of a king. Savonarola soon detected this, and began 
to prophesy the speedy downfall of the Medicean family. 
In thirteen sermons in Lent, on the subject of Noah's ark, 



72 Essays of To- Day. 



he declared that the floods of divine vengeance would 
sweep over Italy ; that the sword of the Lord would be 
unsheathed, — " Gladius Domini super terram cito et ve- 
lociter." He declared that an avenger would bring his 
wrathful army over the Alps, and that the hand of the 
Lord would sustain him as he opened the way before 
Cyrus, his servant of old. 

Still the people went on in their gayeties, until the army 
of Charles VI I L appeared in Italy only a few months after 
Savonarola's prophecy. Taking possession of Naples, it 
advanced on Florence. The Medici were summarily ex- 
pelled ; but Pietro, being captured, promised to deliver up 
his castles to Charles, and to give him his treasures in 
Florence. 

The wildest excitement prevailed within the city when 
the news of Pietro's treachery was made known, and Sa- 
vonarola was sent out to make better terms with the 
French king. This he succeeded in doing; and, by his 
recitals of prophecy and his talk as an anointed reformer 
of the Lord, so moved Charles that he granted very easy 
terms ; and, after visiting Florence as a guest instead of a 
conqueror, he went over the Alps again to Paris. 

After this Savonarola's influence at Florence was un- 
bounded. A new government was formed, which was in 
effect a theocracy. Christ was to be the only monarch ; 
a general forgiveness of political enemies was to take 
place ; and thirty-two hundred citizens formed themselves 
into a general council, who, by lot, in instalments of six 
months at a time, represented the general assembly as its 
executive body. 



Savonarola. 73 



Here, then, not exalting himself or his priestly order, 
was a monk ruling a republic of Europe, which but a 
short time before was a principality, governed by an aris- 
tocratic noble. He was seen continually among the poor ; 
the money that was sent to him was systematically spent 
in relieving the wretched ; and the pulpit of his cathedral 
was his throne and rostrum of power. Florence crowded 
to hear him preach and lecture, as he allegorized out of the 
Bible to suit the existing state of political affairs. 

So great was the revival of morality and religion after 
the bewildering intoxication of Lorenzo's pleasures and 
amusements in Florence, that fasting became common, 
meat was unbought in the markets, the theatres drooped, 
gambling was no longer seen in taverns, and gay Florence 
began to take on the quiet soberness of a Puritan common- 
wealth. The custom in Florence of burning cherished 
treasures towards the end of the carnival season became 
a religious epidemic ; and children with white dresses and 
garlanded with olive-branches on their heads, went through 
the city demanding books, pictures, poems, dice, cards, 
dream-books, false hair, musical instruments, and such 
things as these, which they burned in monstrous piles, 
singing and chanting psalms, until their bonfires of van- 
ity, as they were called, were consumed. 

Then, after turning his mind to the system of the 
education of the children of Florence, Savonarola began 
to write and preach about the abuses of the Church at 
Rome. At last the tidings of his reforms reached the 
ears of the Papal Court. The infamous Alexander VI. 
(Borgia) silently presented Savonarola with a cardinal's 



74 Essays of To-Day . 



hat, on the hush-money principle, which was instantly 
refused. Hereupon Savonarola was urgently invited to 
visit Rome ; but, bearing in mind the castle of St. Angelo 
and its dark surroundings, he declined the invitation. 

Then the controversy between the Pope and the monk 
began ; and the stern reformer was slowly but surely 
dragged down into the intricate and cruel machinery of 
that remorseless engine, the Church of Rome ; and was 
at last crushed by it, — as those who went before him and 
came after him were crushed : as all were crushed who 
came into collision with it, from the time of Jerome of 
Prague and John Huss, to P'ather Lacordaire and P^re 
Hyacinthe. 

When at last he found that he was in the midst of the. 
long-dreaded conflict with the power at Rome, Savonarola 
took a bold step, which hurried on the final crisis. He 
petitioned the kings of Spain and of France, and the 
emperor of Germany, to summon a General Council to 
try its hand on the reforms of the Church. When this 
was known at Rome, through a spy, the Pope ordered the 
monastery of St. Mark's, at Florence, to be broken up, 
and forbade Savonarola to preach. He remained quiet 
for a while ; but at last his spirit could refrain no longer, 
and he appeared again in his old pulpit of the cathedral. 
Then the Pope demanded of the Council of Florence that 
he should be given up ; but it was in vain. 

Meantime the rival Franciscan monks, jealous of the 
fame of the Dominicans through the wonderful influence 
of this man, their head, joined with the discontented young 
nobles and Medicean followers who had been satirizing the 



Savonarola. 75 



late reforms, and were already plotting for the return of 
the family of Pietro. 

At a preconcerted signal, — the throwing of an alms-box 
in the cathedral, — an armed attack was made on him while 
he was preaching; but the monks of St. Mark's rushed 
round him and fought from the pulpit-steps with the 
fierceness of tigers, and carried him off in triumph to 
the convent, crying out, curiously enough, the battle-cry 
of the Scotch reformers, " Long live Jesus, our King ! " 
After this, Alexander threatened the entire city with an 
interdict ; and a fearful plague which followed, and in which 
thousands died, was looked upon as a judgment for resisting 
the successor of St. Peter. Savonarola's enemies, too, de- 
manded that, if he was in reality a prophet, he should do 
the work of a prophet, and perform a miracle to stop the 
plague. At this juncture, one of the Dominican monks — 
Domenico da Peschia — engaged in a controversy with the 
Franciscans, in which the latter declared the only way to set- 
tle the matter as to who was right was by an ordeal of fire. 
The Dominican monk accepted the challenge ; the people 
caught it up, glad of this strange termination of the contro- 
versy, and the council decided that it should take place. 

Savonarola at once regretted the acceptance of the chal- 
lenge by Domenico, and tried to have the matter stopped ; 
but it was too late. The people were clamorous for the 
decision by fire ; and at last, like Saul before the battle 
of Mount Gilboa, with his faith in himself and his sur- 
roundings, and in his past inspirations, all gone, Savona- 
rola in despair accepted the issue. But he tried to put 
on the appearance of unconcern, and piled up the natural 



'J 6 Essays of To- Day. 



difficulties in the way in order to consume time. Finally, 
in the market-place two w^ooden scaffolds were built, fifty 
feet in length. Each was reeking with oil and pitch. 
When they both were lighted, straight through the narrow 
passage-way between them, the two monks were to walk 
in a surging mass of flame, and Heaven would show which 
was the victorious one, which was to redeem his order and 
live through the trial. 

At the hour appointed, the monks of St. Mark's appeared 
with Savonarola at their head, and Domenico, the cham- 
pion of the Dominicans, dressed like a victim for the sac- 
rifice. They came up to the narrow passage-way chanting 
the 68th Psalm, — " Exurgat Deus et dissipeatur inimici 
ejus." 

Then it was declared by the Franciscans that their 
champion should not engage in the struggle so long as 
Domenico had on the dress of the Dominicans, since it 
might have been enchanted by Savonarola. When this 
dress was laid aside, it was decided that Domenico should 
lay aside the crucifix, which he did. Then they said he 
must not carry with him the consecrated host, for fear of 
harm to it. Then there followed a controversy as to 
whether the sacred host could possibly be consumed ; and 
it was finally decided that the friars might be burned, but 
the wafer could not perish. Then, just as the attendants 
were lighting up the blazing, crackling pile, an order came 
from the Signori that the trial should be given up, and each 
party went home declaring they alone were victorious. 

The dramatic sequence to this strange story is a plain 
record, familiar to every student of Church history. Sa- 



Savonarola. yy 



vonarola was arrested in his convent by orders from Rome ; 
and after a cruel torture, in which he confessed every thing 
his torturers put in his mouth, and admitted, when hu- 
man endurance could stand it no longer, that he was a 
perjurer and impostor, he was hung with two of his com- 
panions. 

His courage stood by him to the last. After the recep- 
tion of the Mass in the prison, they walked to the place of 
execution, where Savonarola watched his two friends drop 
from the high gibbet into the blazing fire below them ; 
and then, with an undaunted heart, silently followed them. 
It is said that, as Savonarola's body swung back and forth 
in the flames, the cord which bound his hands behind him 
became loosened, and his right hand spasmodically raised 
itself as if in the accustomed act of blessing. This, and 
the strong wind which kept the flames from touching the 
dead bodies of the monks, were considered as omens of 
Savonarola's sanctity ; and the fickle people, who had seen 
that form so often in the pulpit, scattered in superstitious 
horror, and left the scene in tears. 

This was the only vindication of his life Savonarola ever 
had ; and even this came too late for him to see it. 

The one question asked about the short and striking 
career of Savonarola, — for he was only forty-four years 
old when he died, — is this : was he sincere, or was he 
an impostor } 

In a certain sense he was both ; for while he was true 
in his belief, he was false in his methods, and no doubt 
came at the last to resort to his visions' and prophecies as 
a sort of religious enginery, by which to lift the people 



yS Essays of To-Day. 



and swing them round to a corresponding belief in his plans 
and efforts. Carlyle, in his " Hero-worship," in speaking 
of Napoleon, says that he was great and successful until 
the charlatan element gained the upper hand in him, and 
he came round to a belief in the dupability of men ; and 
then adds, ''Alas, in all of us this charlatan element exists, 
and might be developed were the temptation strong enough. 
— * Lead us not into temptation ! ' Having once parted with 
reality, he tumbles helpless in vacuity ; no help for him. 
He had to sink there, mournfully as man seldom did, and 
break his great heart and die." 

So it was with Savonarola and his belief in visions ; so 
it was with Edward Irving and his belief in prophetic 
tongues. That which at first was a reality in the man's 
own subjective experience became an outward means to 
a desired end, — a part of a system, — and it could not 
stand the rough test of the curious world. 

The man set out with a pure and true aim : he wanted 
to be a reformer. He used the legitimate means which 
came in his way ; and then, when he found the people took 
him as a prophet, and that he could influence them best 
by his reputation as a prophet, he had to go on using this 
as a means to the end. He came into Florence in the 
midst of a splendor of culture never before equalled. With 
this as a background, he brought out clearly and majesti- 
cally to light the great underlying realities of the Christian 
faith. His influence was very marked. He was almost 
worshipped, and was lifted high into the fickle lap of 
power. Success crowned every thing he did ; and per- 
haps he was true and sincere to the very end. If he was 



Savonarola. 79 



sincere, then like some of the anomaUes of history, — hke 
John Brown of Harper's Ferry, — he was a reUgious fa- 
natic. But it is not often that we see such method with 
such madness ; such wisdom with a crazed brain. 

Whatever be the key to Savonarola's character and his 
strange career, this much at least we can say for him : he 
made, in the midst of Pagan culture, the religion of Christ 
the ruling power of the State. He governed from the 
pulpit, wisely and well, a luxurious and epicurean people. 
His reforms were all honest and unselfish in their charac- 
ter. If he was sincere in his own visions all the way to 
the end, then he was crazed ; and, on the other hand, if 
he was not crazed, then he must have relied on his former 
reputation as a prophet to wield the once powerful influ- 
ence which he could not allow himself to give up. The 
miracles of Mahomet, the visions of Swedenborg, the ut- 
terances of Irving, all show us how difficult it is to draw 
the line between that which is wilful imposture and tem- 
perament, or intuitiveness. 

The goodly fellowship of the prophets has been since 
the world began ; but it is not always that the voice cry- 
ing in the wilderness, and speaking because it must speak, 
is one with the voice in the council-chamber, speaking be- 
cause.it has an end to serve. ''Nevertheless, the founda- 
tion of God standeth sure, having his seal. The Lord 
knoweth them that are his." 



8o Essays of To- Day. 



IV, 

EDWARD IRVING. 

TT is one of the many strange positions which the phi- 
-*- losopher Buckle has taken, that, in the history o£ 
civihzation in Europe, Spain and Scotland stand conspic- 
uous as countries which have been essentially priest-ridden 
in character. " Both nations," he writes, " have allowed their 
clergy to exercise immense sway, and both have submitted 
their actions as well as their consciences to the authority 
of the Church. As a natural consequence, in both coun- 
tries intolerance has been and still is a crying evil ; and, in 
matters of religion, a bigotry is habitually displayed dis- 
creditable indeed to Spain, but far more discreditable to 
Scotland, which has produced many philosophers of the 
highest eminence, who would willingly have taught the 
people better things, but who have vainly attempted to 
remove from the national mind that serious blemish which 
mars its beauty and tends to neutralize its many other ad- 
mirable qualities. Herein hes the apparent paradox and 
the real difficulty of Scotch history : that knowledge should 
not have produced the effects which have elsewhere fol- 
lowed it ; that a bold and inquisitive literature should be 
found in a grossly superstitious country, without diminish- 
ing its superstition ; that the people should constantly 



Edward Irving. 



withstand their kings, and as constantly succumb to their 
clergy ; that while they are liberal in politics, they should 
be illiberal in religion, — and that, as a natural consequence 
of all this, men who, in the visible and external department 
of facts and of practical life, display a shrewdness and a 
boldness rarely equalled, should nevertheless, in speculative 
life and in matters of theory, tremble like sheep before their 
pastors, and yield assent to every absurdity they hear, pro- 
vided their church has sanctioned it. That these discre- 
pancies should coexist seems at first a strange contradiction, 
and is surely a phenomenon worthy of our careful study." 

In his lectures on the Scottish Church, delivered in 
Edinburgh, in 1872, Dean Stanley refutes this charge; and, 
in that picturesque manner which is so peculiarly his own, 
brings to the front a long succession of men who combined 
the deep religious sentiment which Buckle admits, and the 
spirit of independence which he admires, with a just and 
philosophic moderation which, had he known, he could not 
have failed to admit and to admire equally. 

Scottish ecclesiastical history, because of its ruggedness 
and because of its cannyness, is as teeming with interest 
to the theological student as its secular history is to the 
youthful reader of '' Tales of a Grandfather," or the V/a- 
verley Novels, It all seems like a rich and glowing game 
of chess, in which one's intensest sympathy is aroused. 
From the days of the Black Douglass and the Red Comyn; 
from the crash and the shock of Macduff and his followers 
in the green boughs of Dunsinane around the doomed 
castle of Macbeth ; from the adventures of Mary, and the 
death of Rizzio ; from Cardinal Beaton, and the gloom of 

6 



Essays of To-Day . 



Bannockburn, to the days of the Tulchan Bishops and the 
fiery expulsion of Edward Irving from a church which 
was itself the child of revolution, — ■ this same red-hot 
Scotch earnestness runs. Kings, Queens, Knights, and 
Pawns, of every sort and description, move over the board 
of its history, and are continually checked and taken. We 
are familiar with this peculiar exhibition of Scottish spirit, 
not only through Scott's historical romances, but by a 
late inundation of stories of quiet domestic life, from the 
pens of Edward Garrett, Norman McLeod, and George 
McDonald. 

The heat radiating over a kitchen stove, and the storm- 
currents circling the globe, as they get the set of their 
motion over the heated equator, are in principle precisely 
the same, though the one field is somewhat more con- 
tracted than the other. And on the same principles and 
on the same plane, the volcanic, explosive Scotch nature 
shows itself in the strifes of the Church as in those of 
the State. It is as much wrought up in low as in high 
life, — whether it be the poor sergeant with his dead boy's 
starling, which would sing songs on the holy Sabbath, 
thereby causing a scandal and a row in the parish, — as 
Norman McLeod has pictured it in that best of his 
Scotch stories, "The Starling," — or whether it be Jenny 
Geddes hurling the stool at the Dean, in Saint Giles' 
Church, on the day when the Prayer-book was introduced, 
and extinguishing that liturgy for a whole century as she 
exclaimed, confounding the words, ** collect for the day," 
with something about colic : " The de'il warm the colic 
in thee ! " 



Edwai'd Irving. 83 



Into this stormy yet most attractive region of ecclesi- 
astical history let us enter, and consider the character, 
career, and writings of that strangely-conspicuous figure, 
Edward Irving. He seems like one of the colossal stat- 
ues of Egypt, — a Rameses, gigantic indeed, but fallen 
and broken ; or an isolated Memnon, once tuneful with 
inspiration and hope, but now silent and Sphinx-like and 
forsaken. 

The man himself is so attractive ; the movement stands 
in ecclesiastical history as such an enigma ; and the ver- 
dict of his church and nation is so peculiarly Scottish, — 
that the entire subject is most inviting to those who will 
lift the latch-string and enter. 

Edward Irving appeared upon the platform of the Scot- 
tish Church at the time when the early fame of Dr. Chal- 
mers was slowly and surely rising to a higher eminence, 
and when the Free Church of Scotland was in its infancy. 
Chalmers, we know, had been blessed with all the surround- 
ings and experiences which were calculated to give him the 
very strongest kind of influence. Born in the middle class 
of the Scotch nation ; his parents firm Calvinistic Presby- 
terians ; his youth falling within the period of the eccle- 
siastical experiment of Moderatism ; a vigorous writer and 
thinker ; first a member of what Richard Holt Hutton 
calls " The Hard Church," — he afterwards reacted from 
his scientific pursuits, from the ebbing-tide of humanita- 
rian moderatism, and from the minute dogmatism of the 
bony-fish theology about him, into the strong, loving power 
of a truly evangelical grasp of faith. This inward, second 
conversion of maturity, and this reaction from those cross- 



84 Essays of To- Day, 



current extremes, — the drift of mere sentiment and the 
drift of mere dogma, — gave him that balance and sureness 
St. Paul loved to speak of, when he quotes from the prophet 
Isaiah that favorite text of his, *' He that believeth shall not 
make haste." 

Into the constant presence and under the far-reaching 
shadow of this great teacher of the day, the gushing, 
awkward, tender, inexperienced Irving entered. Straight 
from the countrified boorishness of the far-off little town 
of Annan, this tall, shuffling, cross-eyed young Scotchman 
came, to be the assistant of him who was working in Glas- 
gow like a second Calvin in Geneva ; who was known 
throughout the English-speaking world by his astronomical 
sermons, which in one year's time had run through nine 
editions, each twenty thousand copies ; and who, by his 
wise spiritual dictatorship, in his marvellous administra- 
tion of the congregation of Glasgow, in the establishment of 
home missions for the masses, and in the final creation of 
the Free Church of Scotland, stood modestly, yet with prim- 
itive dignity, at the very head of that Church and nation 
over which, in the days of the Reformation, John Knox was 
the acknowledged Protestant Pope. Thus it was that, un- 
der the shadow of Chalmers's greatness, the young Irving 
became known, — preaching for him upon wet and stormy 
afternoons, and taking the least interesting engagements ; 
and in every way beginning at that lowest round of minis- 
terial labor, contained in the faithful discharge of an assist- 
ant's duties, — duties whose surroundings often are not 
joyous but grievous, but which afterwards tell, as their 
experiences are ground into the untempered edge of raw, 



Edward Irving. 85 



unchecked zeal. How strange the contrast between the 
maledictions, savoring rather of strength than of holiness, 
which were mentally and inaudibly pronounced upon this 
unconscious young assistant, as from time to time he 
occupied Dr. Chalmers's pulpit in Glasgow, and the un- 
willing congregation of London, — among whom were 
Canning, Wilkie, Carlyle, Coleridge, Zachary Macaulay, 
Charles Lamb, and others, — who thronged the building 
only to hang upon the words of Irving in the after-days 
of his greatness, wondering why the now waning Chalmers 
could be so bold as to supply his former assistant's place 
for a Sunday, and refusing to hear the voice of this once 
powerful charmer, charm he never so wisely ! 

And now, in what is to be said upon this subject, I shall 
arrange the material before us in these four parts : — 

1. The life and character of Irving. 

2. The quality of his writings. 

3. His influence in the movement known as Irvingism. 

4. The subsequent history of this sect, known as the 
Catholic Apostolic Church. 

I. We begin, then, with his life. Edward Irving was born 
on the 4th of August, 1792, — - that darkening year, when all 
Europe was watching infuriated France, going mad in the 
wild license of her Revolution. Away off, on the Solway 
Frith, very near the town cross, in the little town of Annan, 
this child was born, the second in a family of eight chil- 
dren. His father was a tanner by trade, a Whig in politics, 
and a devoted member of the Kirk. Under influences 
which are familiar to us from the many late stories of 
Scottish religious life, this child was reared. At thirteen. 



86 Essays of To-Day. 



he began his studies at Edinburgh University ; and after 
this, partially by teaching, and partially by other help, he 
went on for five years, studying divinity : matriculating 
regularly, and going through the necessary examinations. 
It was at this time that Carlyle saw him for the first time, 
and describes him as follows : " The first time I saw Irving 
was in his native town of Annan ; he was fresh from 
Edinburgh with college prizes, high character and promise. 
We heard from him of famed professors, of high matters 
classical and mathematical, — a whole wonder-land of knowl- 
edge ; nothing but joy, health, hopefulness without end, 
looked out from the blooming young man." 

He was also described at this time by another person as 
"a showy young man," — a tendency always held in abhor- 
rence by the sober Scotch imagination, which above all 
things admires the gift of reticence. After an experience 
as teacher in the town of Kirkcaldy, upon the Frith of 
Forth, he received his license to preach, and occasionally 
supplied the place of Dr. Martin, the minister. But he had 
a hard time of it, and got no credit and very little encour- 
agement in what he still hoped was his real vocation. The 
people said he had " ower muckle grandeur ; " and Mrs. 
Oliphant, in her life of him, describes the congregations as 
being very thin, when it was known young Irving was to 
preach in that very church in which, years afterwards, a 
dreadful accident occurred, owing to the breaking away of 
the crowded galleries, filled with these same towns-people, 
who pressed in to hear the famous London preacher. 

Then followed the Glasgow experience. Here he was 
only an unordained probationer, — not in any sense even a 



Edward Irving. 87 



curate, but only a helper to the already overburdened Chal- 
mers. There are many stories of the strange impression 
he here made in his new field. There seems to have been 
something about his presence which was strangely com- 
manding, — an unction or weird glamour that was the most 
essential witchery. One lady in Dr. Chalmers's congrega- 
tion, who told her servant to say she was " engaged " when 
visitors called, w^as met by her domestic, saying, " There 's 
a wonderful grand gentleman down stairs ; I could na say 
you were engaged to him, — he maun be a Highland chief." 
Another thought he was a leader of brigands ; while still a 
third said, " That Dr. Chalmers's assistant ! I took him for 
a cavalry officer." " Whatever they say of him, they never 
think him like any thing but a leader of men," was yet an- 
other verdict upon him. At last, with prophetic words 
whose full meaning at the time he but little realized, he 
took his leave of Glasgow with the following words : " God 
above doth know my destiny ; but though it were to minister 
in the halls of nobles, and the courts and palaces of kings. 
He can never find for me more natural welcome, more 
kindly entertainment, and more refined enjoyment than 
He hath honored me with in this manufacturing city. My 
theology was never in fault around the fires of the poor, 
my manner never misinterpreted, my good intentions never 
mistaken. Churchmen and Dissenters, Catholics and Prot- 
estants, received me with equal graciousness. Here was the 
popularity worth the having ; whose evidences are not in 
noise and ostentation and numbers, but in the heart opened 
and disburdened, in the flowing tear, the confided secret, the 
parting grasp, and the entreaty to return. Of this popu- 



Essays of To-Day. 



larity I am covetous ; and God in his goodness hath granted 
it in abundance, with which I desire to be content." 

We next behold Irving estabUshed in the very heart of 
London, settled over the little Caledonian Chapel, which 
would only accommodate about six hundred persons. Sir 
James Mackintosh and Canning having quoted, in the 
House of Commons, Irving's eloquence and ability to 
maintain his church, as an instance of the possibility of 
church-revenues without state aid and patronage, a flood 
of noble and fashionable hearers began to pour in upon 
the little chapel in Hatton Garden. From this time on,- — 
through the conflict about Christ's nature, and the strife 
about the miraculous gift of tongues, all the way to his 
trial and deposition, and to his sudden death, — through 
the wildness and bitterness of his famous ecclesiastical 
trial, — his dominant popularity never waned. The poet 
Keats says, in his " Endymion," in a vivid picture of 
the superficial and unworthy Agamemnon-like king of 
men : — 

" There are who lord it o'er their fellow-men 
With most prevailing tinsel ; with not one tinge 
Of sanctuary splendor, not a sight 
Able to face an owl's, they still are dight 
By the blear-eyed nations in empurpled vests 
And crowns and turbans." 

But here was a man w^ho was able, to the very last, to 
" lord it o'er his fellow-men," by most prevailing unction, 
and most undoubted power. 

After this, w^e find him very frequently visiting Coleridge 
at Highgate, — an intercourse which was full of kindness 
on the part of the philosopher, and reverence and respect 



Edward Irving. 89 



on the part of the preacher. The first exhibition we have of 
any decided mental eccentricity is in his famous missionary 
sermon. Having been requested by the London Mission- 
ary Society to preach an anniversary sermon, he complied, 
before thinking very much what this promise meant. As 
the time drew near, we read in his journal that he with- 
drew into the country, that he might search the Scriptures 
in order to find his material for the construction of an ideal, 
model missionary. A building known as the Tabernacle, 
built for Whitfield, was secured for the occasion. The day 
was wet and stormy, but the great building was crowded 
long before the hour. The sermon was so long that he 
had to pause twice during its course, and rest himself and 
the vast congregation with a hymn. But such a sermon, 
and such a surprise to the committee, who had been count- 
ing the heads in that crowd with joy, as they thought of 
the contribution- boxes and their gains! It was all about 
the ideal apostle, working out of love to Christ, with no 
regard to committees or societies or machinery of any 
kind ! The elaborately-constructed system of the mis- 
sionary-board melted away like a mockery-man of snow, 
under the melting, thawing process of this burning-glass 
scorch ! A hilarious elephant, put in a china-closet to 
defend the brittle ware, could not have been more ut- 
terly out of place than was this hitherto unyoked minis- 
ter. But, as we shall presently see, he was even then 
feeling after that inspired apostleship which, later on, 
he found in the movement known as the Catholic Apos- 
tolic Church. 

After the famous charge of heresy, with reference to the 



go Essays of To-Day . 



sinlessness of Christ, of which we shall speak presently, we 
find Irving next engaged in the prophetical circles which 
met at Albury, — that place which was afterwards, and 
has remained ever since, the shrine of the restored apostles. 
Here he pubhshed his lectures on Revelation, and a series 
of papers in their published organ, '' The Morning Watch," 
on " Old Testament Prophecies quoted in the New." Then 
came, in quick succession, after these glimpses of millen- 
nial blessedness, the circles for prayer that God would send 
better days, and make His power felt in the world ; that 
new apostles might be called and chosen ; that the mirac- 
ulous gifts of healing and of prophecy might be restored 
to the Church; and that the promised power of the 
Holy Ghost might descend upon the world. And then 
at once, as by a flash, there came news from the North 
— away off in the very home of the rugged Scotch faith — 
of the different cases of healing, and the strange manifes- 
tations of the " tongues." This was followed by the like 
manifestations in Irving's own congregation, — breaking 
out even in the regular Sabbath services. Then, just be- 
fore the final crisis, we find him breaking away from the 
excitement of these new revelations, and making a tour 
through Ireland. More now than ever, because of these 
strange rumors which preceded him, did the crowds flock 
to hear him. His letters home to his wife and children 
are filled with this one idea of the restoration of the apos- 
tolic gifts. He hears a little five-year-old girl singing to 
herself in one of the houses where he stays in Dublin, and 
asks the child what it is. She answers, it is a little song 
she has made up for herself ; and then she sings it : — 



Edward Irving. 91 



" Come, my little lambs, 
And feed by my side, 
And I will give you to eat of my body, 
And to drink of the blood of my flesh ; 
And ye shall be filled with the Holy Ghost. 
And whosoever believeth not on me 
Shall be cast out ; 
But he that believeth on me 
Shall feed with me, 
Beside my Father." 

" Even the children," he writes home, "are receiving the long- 
foretold gift, according to the promise, ' Out of the mouths 
of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength.' " At 
last, after the council in London, which met to pass judg- 
ment upon these startling manifestations and utterances, had 
decided that Irving was not fit to be a minister, the matter 
came before the Presbytery of Annan ; and thither he went 
for final trial. 

Ecclesiastical trials are always sad exhibitions of human 
nature, tossed about by wrong motives and insufficient 
grounds of evidence. Frequently it happens that the very 
doctrines in dispute can never be stated in clearer terms 
than the old definition itself, sheltered under which these 
opposite parties rest. This Annan trial reads like an 
assize of Judge Jeffries, or the scene of Christian's trial 
under Judge Hategood, at Vanity Fair, in " Pilgrim's 
Progress," or like an inquisition of Torquemada. 

Buckle seems to be right, after all, in his apparent para- 
dox about Scotland and Spain, when we come to this same 
craving after ecclesiastical tribunals. The special charge 
brought against Irving, however, was not the irregularities 
in worship caused by the so-called miraculous gift of 
tongues, but his heretical views as to the human nature 



Essays of To-Day. 



of Christ. Annan was his birthplace ; and there, in his 
old parish church, and in the presence of not less than two 
thousand persons, who came flocking in from all the country 
round about, he was put upon trial for what was far dearer 
to him than life. In his defence, he denied with vehement 
indignation the charge that he had imputed sinfulness to 
the Lord. With a heart breaking with sorrow for the 
dishonor of Christ, and swelling with anger at the griev- 
ous injustice that was done to himself, he reaffirmed his 
faith that Jesus became in all things one with his brethren, 
and was tempted in all points like as they are, yet without 
sin. He says : " I stand here a witness for the Lord Jesus, 
to tell men what he did for them ; and what he did was 
this : he took your flesh and made it holy, thereby to make 
you holy ; and therefore he will make every one holy who 
believes in him. He came into your battle, and trampled 
under foot Satan, the world, the flesh, —yea, all enemies of 
living men ; and saith to every one, ' Be ye holy, for I am 
holy.' Ah ! was he not holy t Holy in his mother's womb, 
holy in his childhood, holy in his advancing years, holy in 
his nativity, holy in his resurrection, — and not more holy 
in one than in another 1 " 

But it was in vain. Sentence was passed against him. 
But, just as the moderator was about to proceed to the 
solemn work of deposing him from the ministry, before 
the senior member of the Presbytery had offered up the 
closing prayer, a voice was heard from a distant corner of 
the dark building, exclaiming, " Arise, depart ! arise, depart ! 
Flee ye out of her ! Ye cannot pray ! How can ye pray .? 
How can ye pray to Christ, whom ye deny.? Ye cannot 



Edward Irving. 93 



pray ! Depart, flee ! " The voice was strong and very solemn, 
coming as it did with the bold unction of some Hebrew 
prophet, in the stillness and gathering darkness of the late 
afternoon session. The confused congregation gathered 
round Irving ; his friend, Mr. Dow, to whom this prophetic 
utterance had been given, exclaimed : " Stand forth ! stand 
forth ! What ! will ye not obey the voice of the Holy Ghost .? 
As many as will obey the voice of the Holy Ghost, let 
them depart ! " He thereupon left the church, exclaiming : 
" Blessed be the Lord, who hath not given us a prey to 
their teeth! Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare 
of the fowler ; the snare is broken, and we are escaped ! " 

" Thus," says Mrs. Oliphant, in her most interesting life 
of Irving, '' in the twilight of that March night, Edward 
Irving went forth from the church where he had been 
baptized and ordained, — from the Church of Scotland, the 
sanctuary of his fathers, — nevermore to enter within walls 
dedicated to her service, till he entered in silent pomp to 
wait the resurrection and advent of his Lord. But it was 
a comfort to his forlorn heart to be sent forth by that voice 
which he believed to be the voice of God. The anguish of 
hearing the sentence of deposition was spared him, and 
with a pathetic joy he rejoiced over this, when he gave his 
own account of the eventful day." 

After this he returned to London, and refrained from 
exercising any of his ministerial functions, though urged 
by others not to mind the deposition of the Church. His 
friends in the new rnovement, afterwards known as the 
Cathohc Apostolic Church, gathered round him, and soon 
a congregation was formed for him in Newman Street. 



94 Essays of To-Day. 



Here he waited, not as a leader, but as a follower, in this 
church of the so-called Apostolic restoration, until he re- 
ceived ordination as an " angel " over the Newman-Street 
parish. Then followed the breaking-up of health, and the 
last journey to the North, through Wales, and the final 
death-scene in Glasgow ; where, as a pilgrim and a stranger, 
he was tarrying for a night. There, in the crypt of Glas- 
gow Cathedral, in December, 1834, he was buried. He 
was followed to the grave by unnumbered friends and 
former followers, — Dr. Chalmers, who had first introduced 
him to London, coming forward now to offer a last resting- 
place to all that remained of his former assistant. And 
there, in that Scotch Westminster Abbey, all that is mor- 
tal of this strange Scottish priest and prophet rests. 

2. In the second part of this paper we were to notice 
the quality of Irving's writings. In the popular and too 
often superficial judgment upon the career of this man, we 
are apt to render the easy verdict of insanity, and then 
throw away his life and writings as so much wasted power. 
But his influence and his greatness were not alone in his 
enthusiasm, in any eccentricity of manner, or pecuHarly 
gorgeous style. He was not merely a rhetorician or an 
enthusiast. He was a careful and most suggestive thinker. 
There was that in his voice and method which made him 
appear as a restored Hebrew prophet, but it was not solely 
"vox et praeterea nihil." He had a burden to deliver, as 
well as a commission by which he was enabled to deliver 
it. The voice said, *' Cry ! " and his messages were always 
worth hearing. He was a careful student, and was known 
in his college life as " the great mathematician." He had 



Edward Irvmg. 95 



originality and suggestiveness. His wealth of mind shows 
itself in the deep intuitive grasp with which he laid hold 
of truth. 

At times he seems Baconian. There is a strange min- 
gling of dogmatic orthodoxy with a something which was 
coming afterwards. It is very easy to see the influence 
of Coleridge and Carlyle blending with his mental vigor. 
Many of his sermons read like an amalgam of Chalmers 
and Robertson. In theology and in metaphysics, in eccle- 
siology and in ethics, he is never commonplace or super- 
ficial. The Trinity and the Incarnation, as modes of the 
being of God ; the vexing questions of the Sacraments, 
and the party-cry of Election, — are never with him wooden 
dogmas. He is always ready to give a strong reason for 
the hope that he so tenaciously holds. But the one truth 
which became the root-idea of his theology was the living 
power of the Incarnation. This it was, which, while it 
gave to him a newer, fresher meaning to the doctrine of 
the Atonement, paved the way for his after-views about 
the coming of Christ, and the restoration of supernatural 
gifts, and the final charge of heresy concerning the human 
nature of the Son of God. In one of his sermons, in 
speaking of this doctrine, he says : " To every thought, 
word, and act of Christ there concurreth two operations : 
an operation in the infinite Godhead, and an operation in 
the finite manhood ; and that these two operations are not 
the operations of two persons, but of one person only. And 
what result and inference have you but this most sublime, 
most perfect one, that all the volitions, purposes, and actings 
of the Godhead are one with all the volitions and actings of 



96 Essays of To-Day. 



the manhood of Christ ? For the Godhead never acteth 
but by the Son ; and the Son never acteth unto the creat- 
ures but by the manhood, which, with his Godhead, formeth 
one person. Wherefore this sublime truth is for ever in- 
corporated in the person of Christ, that Godhead and man- 
hood are not in amity merely, not in sympathy merely, but 
in union, unity, and unction, hypostatical or consubstantial. 
Atonement, then, or reconciliation, is a mere notion, figure 
of speech, or similitude, until it be seen effected in the 
constitution of the person of Christ under these two wills 
or operations. I object not to the similitude taken from 
paying debts, nor to the similitude taken from redeeming 
captives, nor to the similitude taken from one man's dying* 
for another, nor to any of the similitudes which St. Paul 
useth most eloquently and most fitly for illustrating and 
enforcing this most precious truth of the atonement or rec- 
onciliation ; but the similitudes are to my mind only poor 
helps for expressing the largeness and completeness of the 
thing which is done by the Word's being made flesh." 

It was his desire to press home the power of incarnation, 
which led him to represent the human nature of Christ as 
a real one, and in all things so like our own that it was 
possessed of inward sinful inclinations ; only Christ never 
yielded to them. Christ's body he declared had been sinful 
from birth ; it was flesh like Adam's after his fall, and it 
became sinless only after the resurrection ; or, in other 
words, that we can receive Christ's true humanity only in 
case it was subject to sin. 

We can judge somewhat of the zealous character of his 
critics and reviewers, when we find Irving, in 1830, writing 



Edward Irving, - 97 



to Dr. Chalmers : " Really, I am ashamed in the sight of 
English scholars, to see a man, pretending to judge these 
great questions, talking about * MonotJiolos himself.' If 
he is ever to become your colleague, get him at least better 
instructed in the nomenclature of the heresies, so that he 
shall not mistake the name of an opinion for the name of 
a man." 

3. Let us now notice the relation of Irving to the move- 
ment known as " Irvingism." 

When we come to investigate this subject, we find that 
there is no such thing as Irvingism in the eyes of his fol- 
lowers. It is a mere outside nickname. The members 
of the Catholic Apostolic Church ignore it in the way 
that an Anglican priest of the Catholic-revival type scorns 
to be called a Puseyite. In a letter addressed to me by 
a minister in the Catholic Apostolic Church, he says : "Let 
me beg you to avoid the frequently-uttered slander that 
the Church teaches the sinfulness of Christ's human na- 
ture, for it has not a shadow of truth. Let me hope, also, 
that what you may read will satisfy you of the impropriety 
of designating by the nickname of * Irvingism ' a movement 
which he did not originate, and in which he held only a 
subordinate position." This movement of the restoration 
of the Apostolic Church began with a circle of prayer and 
study, which met at Albury in 1826, at the house of Mr. 
Henry Drummond. Irving was in frequent attendance 
upon these meetings, but he was not their head and organ- 
izer. The object of these meetings at first was simply to 
study the prophetical Scriptures, and to pray for the revival 
of true religion. The special theory Irving pressed home 

7 



Essays of To- Day 



was the great truth of the Incarnation and the verity of 
our Lord's human nature. Then came the news of pe- 
cuhar phenomena in Scotland, especially at Port-Glasgow. 
Apparently ignorant persons were endowed with the gift 
of prophecy ; there were also wonderful cases of heal- 
ing, closely resembling in character the miracles of the 
New Testament. For instance, James Campbell, living on 
the Clyde, was so endowed with the Holy Ghost, the result 
of Miss I\Iary Campbell's prayers, that he went to the bed- 
side of his sister, who was lying very ill, and healed her by 
a word of command. IMany other such cases occurred. 
All this time, Irving, with others of his flock, attended 
these prayer-meetings, held by the members of the old 
church, where there were the gifts of tongues and proph- 
ecy. Still in the Church of Scotland, he tried to regulate 
these utterances ; but the manifestations became so noisy 
in the public congregation, that at last his church was 
closed against him. There is a memorable scene in his 
life, where he talked with Coleridge and Chalmers on this 
subject. They warned him to discountenance publicly 
these manifestations. But, just about this period, one 
Baxter, a renegade from the new movement, declared that, 
though he had felt impelled to go to the great Court of 
Chancery to interrupt its proceedings by bearing a witness 
in the power of the Spirit against the sins of the kingdom, 
and though he had done many other such things, and, 
after all, had renounced the brethren, — he still maintained 
that he had acted by a supernatural influence, over which 
he had no power, and that, if it was not from God, it was 
from Satan, the author of discord and confusion and deceit. 



Edward Irving. 99 



Here, then, it was that Irving took his final stand. Though 
his friends remonstrated, though Thomas Carlyle, himself 
the apostle of a new era, begged him not to go any further, 
— in an interview through which Irving sat in silence, his 
face buried in his hands, — he said: *' We have prayed for 
these manifestations, and they have come. Here is a su- 
pernatural power; it must be from God. I know there is 
disorder and uncontrolled chaos ; but so there was at Cor- 
inth, and this is a restored Corinthianism. I cannot de- 
sert my brethren. I will go with them ; and, * if I perish, 
I perish! ' " 

At the beginning of this manifestation of prophetic 
utterances, the cry was heard, " Send us Apostles ! send 
us Apostles ! " For a while this cry was not understood. 
Afterwards, there was a prophetic communication indicat- 
ing a certain person as one whom the Lord had called to 
be an apostle. Then others were named as separated for 
this work, in the same way that Paul and Barnabas were 
set apart for their work. In the spring of 1834, as the Rev. 
Mr. Davenport says in his pamphlet upon this subject, 
" Irving was deposed by the Presbytery for alleged heresy 
in regard to the human nature of the Lord. This sentence 
he at first considered null and void ; and on his return to 
London was about to resume his functions, when he was 
directed, by a word spoken supernaturally by the apostle 
who had first been called, to suspend his ministry except 
in preaching, and not to administer the Sacrament in the 
congregation until he should receive a new ordination, 
which was to be given to him shortly; and which was con- 
ferred by the hands of the apostle in a few days afterwards, 



100 Essays of To- Day. 



when he was ordained 'angel' over the church in Newman 
Street." 

Soon after this, in December of the same year, he died. 
According to the authorities of the new movement, he 
died just at the right time. He had been a faithful wit- 
ness to the truth of Jesus Christ come in the flesh, and of 
his second coming ; and now the way for the new move- 
ment was clear. 

Never, in all the range of ecclesiastical history, is 
there need for a nicer and more delicate balancing of 
judgment, than in this question. If we read of the utter- 
ances and confusion in Irving's church, and then compare 
all this carefully with St. Paul's account of the manifesta- 
tions at Corinth, the spiritual enthusiasm and the disorder 
seem exactly the same in both cases. It seems at first 
sight a difficult thing to say, with a God who rules over 
every epoch of his Church, and is " the same yesterday, 
to-day, and for ever," that one was genuine because it 
was in the first, and the other was spurious because it 
was in the eighteenth. Christian century. Coleridge him- 
self had said of him, " I see in Edward Irving a minister 
after the exact order of St. Paul." Irving maintained that 
miraculous gifts of the Spirit ceased, not because they 
were no longer of use to the Church, but because the 
faith of the Church grew cold and dead. Mr. Drummond 
declared that the Romish Church was right, in maintain- 
ing that we Protestants have no ground for saying that 
miracles were ever to cease, and that we can produce no 
warrant from Scripture for so saying. Thus, when this 
supposed restoration of apostolic gifts burst upon the 



Edward Irving. loi 



Church, these men were wrought up to such a state of 
spiritual tension that they were quite prepared for them. 
This gift of tongues was not a knowledge of languages, 
as it was not this with the Corinthians. It was an 
ecstatic series of utterances, differing not very greatly 
in character from those vivid delineations of camp-meet- 
ing experiences, with the prophetic language of the prophet 
Dred, given by Mrs. Stowe in her story of that name, 
describing slave-life in the great Dismal Swamp of North 
Carolina. 

Here are two or three examples taken from Mrs. Oli- 
phant's biography. Mr. Irving is preaching when these 
utterances are heard, more or less rhythmical in character, 
taking the complexion of the last strain of the preacher. 

" I have set before — oh, I have set before thee an open door. 
Oh, let no man shut it ! Oh, let no man shiit it ! " 

After the invitation to the Communion, a voice is heard 
as follows : — 

" Ah, be ye warned, — be ye warned ! The Lord hath prepared 
for you a table, but it is a table in the presence of your enemies. 
Ah, look ye well to it ! The city shall be builded up, — every jot, 
every piece of the edifice. Be faithful each under his load, — 
each under his load ; but see that ye build with one hand and with 
a weapon in the other. Look to it ! look to it ! ye have been 
warned. Ah, Sanballat, Sanballat, Sanballat ! — the Horonite, the 
Moabite, the Ammonite ! Ah, confederate, confederate, confed- 
erate, with the Horonite ! Ah, look ye to it ! look ye to it ! " 

Now at first sight this has a Chadbandish sound, and 
there comes the rising smile as if we were reading from 
Dickens ; but when we examine the irregularities at Cor- 



102 Essays of To- Day. 



inth, where St. Paul was so anxious (Cor. i. 14) to have 
every thing done decently and in order, we find that the 
phenomena in each case are strangely alike. It was a mis- 
interpretation of this chapter, and a false re-localizing of its 
principles to the gatherings at Albury, which led the great 
and gifted Irving into error. This subject of the gift of 
tongues at Corinth we cannot now consider ; but we may 
believe that in all probability, with their heathenish concep- 
tion of Pythonic inspiration, since the word " enthusiasm " 
meant in the classical sense *' God-possessed," these mani- 
festations of the Corinthian Christians were, in some way, 
related to the remarkable phenomena witnessed in clairvoy- 
ance and animal magnetism, or to those ecstatic states ob- 
servable in times of deep religious excitement. Frederick 
W. Robertson, in his lectures on the Corinthians, has a 
judicious interpretation of these phenomena ; and with 
his words I will finish this subject of the "Tongues." 
He says : — 

" Have you ever listened to those airs which are to us harsh and 
unmelodious, but which to the Swiss mountaineer tell of home, 
bringing him back to the scenes of his childhood, speaking to him 
in a language clearer than the tongue ? Or have you ever listened 
to the merry, unmeaning shouts of boyhood, getting rid of exuber- 
ance of life, uttering in sound a joy which boyhood only knows, 
and for which manhood has no words ? Well, in all these you have 
dim illustrations of the way in which new feelings, deep feelings, 
irrepressible feelings, found for themselves utterance in sounds 
which were called tongues. Even at the day of Pentecost, men 
mocking said, ' These men are full of new wine ! ' By St. Paul's 
illustration, in which he compares the gift of tongues to music, he 
shows us too that these feelings needed interpretation, and that 



Edzvard having. 103 



sympathy is the only condition for the interpretation of feehng. 
Take an instance : a child is often the subject of feelings he does 
not understand. See how he is affected by the reading of a tale, 
or a moving hymn : he will not say, ' How touching, how well 
imagined ! ' but he will hide his face because he does not know 
what is the matter with him, and he is ashamed of sensations which 
he does not understand. And so in the same way, it seems to me, 
the early Christians were the subjects of feelings too deep to be 
put into words." 

4. There yet remains the fourth and last department of 
this subject ; namely, the movement called " Irvingism," or, 
as these persons call it themselves, the "Catholic Apos- 
tolic Church." 

The work of the formation and constitution of this new 
Church went on after Irving's death. The number of 
apostles was increased to twelve ; a fourfold ministry was 
appointed ; a ritual was established ; new rites and ceremo- 
nies were introduced, — and thus out of the bosom of the 
Scottish Church, with its Protestant dogma and its absence 
of ceremony, was evolved this strange piece of Ritualism, 
with its incense, its genuflections, and its sacramental 
form of worship. 

The principal features of this movement are these : 
First, the reviving of Catholicism out of tJie midst of Prot- 
estantism. The power of Christianity is found not in any 
doctrine or system alone, but in the "donum supernatu- 
rale" with which the Holy Spirit supplies it. There is a 
complex organization of the Church ; there is belief in the 
power and efficacy of the sacraments as objective incarna- 
tions of Divine power ; and there is the fullest freedom 
given, in the matter of gorgeous and symbolic Ritualism. 



104 Essays of To-Day, 



The second feature of this movement is the restoratio7t 
of sph'itital gifts, including the apostleship and the fourfold 
ministry. There is a belief in cJiarisms which is intri- 
cate and peculiar. These charisms are simply manifesta- 
tions, according to what is in each man, of the indwelling 
Spirit abiding in the Church ; and it fully accounts for 
their suspension to say that the Holy Spirit has been 
grieved, and restrained from working freely and in full 
measure. 

The ministry is fourfold, each with its own gifts : (i) 
Apostles; (2) Prophets; (3) Evangelists; (4) Pastors. 

The Apostolate and the Propheticate were the two 
offices which were restored. But this fourfoldness of 
ministry does not supersede or interfere with the three- 
foldness of order in bishops, priests, and deacons, which 
has ever been preserved in the Church. Thus it happens 
that in every normal congregation, fully organized, there 
was intended to be the three orders of bishop (or angel) ; 
the priests, who may comprise elders, prophets, evange- 
lists, and pastors ; and deacons, among whom again some 
of the same characteristics may be found. 

The third feature of this movement is the prominence 
it gives to the hope of the coming of the Lord. The present 
dispensation is not the final one. Christ shall come and 
dwell with his saints on earth ; there will be a series of 
apocalyptical events leading by degrees to the final end. 
The coming of the Lord is near at hand ; God is doing the 
preliminary work for it ; He is preparing a people to re- 
ceive his Son from heaven, of which this restoration of 
apostles and prophets is a sure and infallible sign. 



Edward Irving. 105 



Forty years liave passed away since the call of these 
apostles, and still this restored Church in miniature waits. 
Three only of the apostles are left to it. One of these is 
paralyzed and bedridden ; the others, vested in their purple 
cassocks, with alb and chasuble, make daily intercession 
for deliverance from heaven, in their chapel at Albury in 
England. On this continent there are two or three small 
congregations in Canada, one in New York, and one in 
Boston. But the once tuneful voice of prophecy is dumb. 
In the New York congregation there is one prophet left, 
who occasionally speaks with " tongues." There are no 
more calls, no new ordinations, no growth ; only the fast- 
contracting little group growing yearly less and less as the 
old members drop off in death. 

But they have done their work, they say ; they have 
been swift witnesses to God's power, and before the last 
man of them dies, the Son of God must come. 

Impelled by a desire, — one part interest, and one part 
curiosity, — I attended service in their little chapel, in one 
of our cities. There are about twenty communicants. The 
Eucharist is celebrated every Sunday morning at ten o'clock, 
and is reserved from Sunday to Sunday in the tabernacle 
upon the altar. There is morning prayer every Monday, 
Wednesday, and Friday, at six o'clock ; and afternoon 
prayer at five o'clock on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I went 
to a service on an afternoon. It was a shorter service, and 
was conducted by a deacon, vested in a long black cassock, 
with a short alb and red stole and gold fringe hanging 
over the left shoulder. Their prayer-book is in many 
respects like that of the Episcopal Church, only it would 



io6 Essays of To-Day. 



delight the heart of a few " advanced " brethren to see in 
plain and lawful black and white, the 

•' Gentle wishes of the heart, 
Subdued and cherished long." 

There were two ladies present, and one man. I sat on the 
back seat, and took my ecclesiastical bearings. In this 
upper-room there were seats for about sixty or eighty per- 
sons. There was a slightly elevated dais in the place of a 
chancel, with a high altar, back against the wall. Two 
large candlesticks stood on either side of the altar, in the 
centre of which was placed the tabernacle, or shrine of 
wood, containing the reserved Sacrament. A lighted lamp 
hung down from the ceiling before this tabernacle. Seats 
were placed on each side of the dais ; a lecturn stood a 
little to the left, and on the extreme left was a little pul- 
pit. The service was intoned in the key of F sharp by a 
deacon. The responses were chanted by a small congre- 
gation of three persons after the most approved cathedral 
style, and I recognized the notes of the familiar versicles 
as we can all remember them in an English choral service. 
In the lesser litany, — as I suppose it might be called, 
— the vested deacon interpolated a special sentence, pray- 
ing that God would restore Apostle Armstrong, lying upon 
his sick-bed. When the service was over, all bowed to the 
altar and retired. The orientation was preserved complete. 
Holy water stood in a bowl at the entrance, and the room 
was flavored with a decided scent of incense. I was told, 
by my friend who gave me the prayer-book and found me 
the places, that the officiating deacon was not consecrated 
to the ministry alone, but that when not officiating in the 



Edward Irving. 107 



chapel he was engaged in secular pursuits. His stole was 
red, to symbolize the blood of Christ. 

With a parting thought of the contrast between Edward 
Irving and the closing scene of his ministry in his deposi- 
tion by the rigid Presbytery of Annan — the very essence 
of Scotch Presbyterianism — and this petite church, which 
seemed somehow like a religious Masonic lodge, I found 
myself on the busy street again, with crowds of men and 
women and carts and horse-cars, passing heedlessly by this 
unknown Church of the Restored Apostles. 



io8 Essays of To- Day. 



V. 

LACORDAIRE. 

TTRENCH religious heroes have been remarkable for 
both of these distinguishing adjectives, — for their 
Frenchiness, and for their religiousness. We know very 
little about St. Denis ; but that other patron saint, King 
Louis, was a fine French fighter after all, even though 
he was so sweet and gentle. If these religious heroes of 
France have been superficial, their superficialness has par- 
taken of their national exuberance ; and if their earnestness 
and reality have been conspicuously eminent, they have 
brought with them that exquisite charm of piquancy so 
peculiar to the French nation. 

St. Philip Neri and Jean Jacques OHer, St. Vincent 
de Paul and Charles de Condren, Madame Guyon and 
Fenelon, Henry Lacordaire and Hyacinthe Loyson, are 
names which we find along the line of French ecclesias- 
tical history ; and through each of these lives there has 
run a sprightliness and vivacity peculiar to the national 
character, which has made even French mysticism a very 
different thing from the German conception of the same 
religious state of mind. It was in France that the mirac- 
ulous appearance of Christ to Margaret Alacoque took 
place nearly a century ago, which resulted in the services 



L acordaire. 1 09 



known as the Devotion of the Sacred Heart. Then it was 
that the apparition of our Lord uttered those words, which 
have since become common on the upraised image of the 
sacred heart : " Behold this heart, which has so loved men, 
and has received nothing but ingratitude in return ! " It 
was in France, about twenty years ago, that the Virgin 
appeared to the peasant children, Maximin and Melane, in 
the field, which has latterly resulted in the pilgrimages 
to the shrine of Notre Dame de La Salette. It was in 
France, too, that the Virgin of the immaculate conception 
appeared in the cave, at Lourdes, to the little girl Berna- 
dette Soubirous, some eight or ten years ago. Here a 
spring of water has burst forth, and miraculous cures of 
every description are wrought upon the pious pilgrims. 
French prints of these shrines make them very attrac- 
tive places, as they show us pretty pilgrims there. There 
is in every way so much about French religion which 
is showy, and produces " effect," — there are so many sto- 
ries abroad at the expense of the French heart, showing 
how every inmost experience works its way out to the 
surface through a tinge of fashion, — that it is a great re- 
lief to find resolute trueness and earnest Christianity at 
the heart of many of their lights and heroes, even if there 
is a rim of the national halo around their lives. But this 
impression of fashionableness is a superficial and acquired 
one. It comes to us from the lightness and frivolity of 
the language, and the customs of France, — language and 
customs alike being best known to us through fashion 
prints, and dancing-schools, and the stage. 

And then, too, we do the French nature wrong, when 



no Essays of To-Day. 



we try to hunt through a strong man's moral and intel- 
lectual caUbre to find out some Northern blood-basis, either 
German or Anglo-Saxon, and lay the secret of the strength 
there. We too often give the credit for the power to some 
foreign share in the pedigree, as if, without some alien 
element in the composition of the nature, the pure un- 
mixed Frenchman could do morally nothing. 

The career of Henry Lacordaire, the restorer of the 
Benedictine Order of preachers, and the greatest French 
pulpit-orator of modern days, is a striking instance of 
national and religious earnestness, held in abeyance to 
the all-powerful fiat of the Papal power. It is hard, at 
first sight, to make out the secret cause of the sudden 
stoppage of his career as a reformer. With his breth- 
ren and friends of the priesthood, as seen by their rap- 
turous approval of his course, the sacrifice of his life's 
most cherished aim to the veto of the Vatican was the 
highest mark of supreme saintliness. In the eyes of his 
enemies, this yielding on his part means the timeserving 
policy which blasted the otherwise fair name of Henry of 
Navarre ; from which Lacordaire's successor — Father Hy- 
acinthe — escaped, even though the latter's escape has as 
yet resulted in nothing definite and tangible in the way 
of ecclesiastical reform. It is difficult to arrive at any sat- 
isfactory decision upon such a character as that of Lacor- 
daire, if once we doubt the moral sincerity of the man. The 
matter of his intellectual appreciation of the age in which 
he lived, and the question of his true and correct judgment 
of the issues of his Church and State, lie in an altogether 
different plane from that which involves moral censure 



Lacordaire. 1 1 1 



upon the man's motives. Emerson may develop from a 
Unitarian preacher into a Transcendentalist philosopher, 
John Henry Newman may change his pulpit at Oxford 
for the cloister of the Oratory at Birmingham, or the 
scientific Wallace become a Spiritualist, in precisely the 
same way that the young ' patriot and reformer Lacor- 
daire travelled, when he gave up his long cherished paper, 
" L'Avenir," and parted company from his political friends, 
De Lamennais and Montalembert. History, and it may 
be our own social circle, is filled with these strange depart- 
ures from the earlier radicalism of young manhood, to the 
cautious conservatism of one's later surroundings. There 
are certain social and professional currents which visibly 
affect men, so that they move like the balloon at certain alti- 
tudes, in horizontal rather than in perpendicular lines. The 
late Canon Kingsley was one of these arrested reformers. 
It is hard to think of the visitor we had so recently upon 
our shores, with his blurred and prejudiced conception of 
the late civil war, as the author of " Alton Locke." Charles 
Dickens, too, as he appeared among us, the thoroughly 
English diner-out, seemed strangely unlike the creator of 
such characters as Tom Pinch and Oliver Twist and Joe 
Gargery. 

We shall see then, a little later on, that the true solution 
of Lacordaire's inverted career, by which he gave up the 
bustling activity of a French newspaper room for the seclu- 
sion of a Dominican cell, is best explained by the ecclesi- 
astical current into which he drifted. We must clear his 
character, at the outset, from the suspicion of a timeserving 
policy. 



1 1 2 Essays of To-Day. 



I have before me now a French photograph of Lacor- 
daire, taken by L. Pierson, Xo. 202 Rue de RivoU, Paris, 
marked as follows: '' Garanti d'apres nature." There can 
be no doubt of the genuineness and reliability of this 
picture. It represents him in his Benedictine dress, with 
smooth face and shaven head, sitting with his side to the 
beholder, but with a full front face Looking at this face 
for the first time, one cannot but be disappointed. The 
dress of the Carmelite Order, which has been popularly 
reproduced in later pictures of Hyacinthe, a A'ery decided 
cunning in the piercing eye, which reminds one of the 
photographs of Pius IX.. and a certain Xapoleonic cast 
of countenance which is very prominent when the monas- 
tic surroundings of the picture are concealed, — all detract 
from the ideal conception of the great preacher. The 
nose is aquiline, the head is conical and Frenchy, like so 
many of their heroes, — as with Thiers, Lafayette, and 
Louis Philippe. The strength of the face, after all, is 
found in the mouth and chin, and the downward lines. 
If, as it has been said, every man is responsible for his 
mouth and the expression around it, then Lac'ordaire's face 
stamps him with great moral purity, and with that absence 
of animalism which is so often found lurking about the 
jaws and lips of some great men and great preachers. 
This would be in keeping with the popularly received dic- 
tum that the character of the mind speaks through the 
upper portion of the face, and the moral quahties through 
the lower portion. There is nothing so strange in Utera- 
ture as the outward knowledge of an author whom we 
have never seen, and the keen disappointment one often 



Lacordaire. 1 1 3 



experiences in coming face to face for the first time with 
the Hving person himself, or the substituted picture of him. 
The ideal face too often disappears before the actual ordi- 
nariness of flesh and blood. " But it is always a pleasure 
to find, in the expression of any strong face, the basilar 
elements of sinful human nature, mastered by some con- 
quering spiritualness, which reigns supreme as the domi- 
nant drift of the soul. And it is this sense of struggle 
and moral victory which, after all, is the salient feature 
of Lacordaire's face. 

Henry Lacordaire, the son of the village doctor of Recey 
Sur Ouce, a small village in Burgundy, was born in the 
year 1802, at the time of a public disturbance among the 
peasantry concerning the civil constitution of the clergy. 
The old cure of the town, when forcibly expelled by the 
crowd, exclaimed, " Kill me, if you please ; but know that 
I will never take a sacrilegious oath." Nicholas Lacor- 
daire took the old priest into his own home, and fitted up 
for him — after the manner of Micah and the Levite, as 
described in the Book of Judges — a little chapel, where 
for three months the services of the Church were con- 
stantly held. It was during this period, when the vil- 
lage church was in the very house of his father, that 
Henry Lacordaire was born and baptized in the loyal faith 
of the Church of Rome. Four years after this event the 
village doctor died ; and the widow Lacordaire, with her 
four children, removed to Dijon. During his childhood, 
Henry was remarkable for great sweetness of disposition, 
and yet for his indomitable will, — a will that insisted, when 
only a child, upon doing those things which his infantile 



1 14 Essays of To-Dny. 



conscience declared right. On one occasion, before he 
was six years old, he insisted upon making a pilgrimage 
to his father's grave, an incident which in after years he 
related with his accustomed eloquence. 

One of the childish premonitions of his after life was 
his fondness for playing priest, and officiating in the pres- 
ence of his nurse at a nursery altar. He would preach by 
the hour in an earnest and incomprehensible rhapsody. 

As he grew older, he evinced a strange fondness for 
reading the sermons of Bourdaloue, and imitating the 
preachers he had heard. At Dijon he was received by 
confirmation into the Church, and seems never to have 
forgotten the parish church where he made his first con- 
fession, and received his first communion. After this he 
entered the school of law in that city, and was soon found 
becoming enthusiastic over the social and political problems 
of the age, and absorbed in the study of that matchless 
heathen, Plato. Then followed one of those strange an- 
titheses in his life, which was such a wonder to his Roman 
Catholic biographers. In the Deism of the age, and in his 
studies of Voltaire and Rousseau, who were the leaders of 
all French philosophy at that period, he lost his faith. 

He next appears in Paris living in a small attic chamber, 
which was all that his limited means and the assistance 
from his mother's purse could allow. During this period 
of his life he was a hard student in the office of an ad- 
vocate, busily engaged, both in the pursuit of his own 
chosen profession of the law, and eagerly studying those 
questions of social and political reconstruction which were 
abroad in the very atmosphere of the age, and which the 



Lacordaire. 



115 



wonderful successes of the young American republic were 
constantly bringing before the minds of French reformers. 
At last the day came when he made his debut at the bar, 
when he won for himself high honors by his power of 
imagination ; so that an old advocate prophesied for him 
a brilliant future, adding, however, that he was destined to 
be a second Bossuet. Then it was that, in the very midst 
of the glories of authorship and legal ambitions, he began 
to feel a., return of his earlier Christian idealism, bringing 
as it did such an open future for his untamed imagination. 
Herein was the secret of his mental struggles. Whenever 
his mind chained down his soul ; whenever the supremacy of 
the logical faculties domineered over the glowing impulses 
of his heart, — there was in his nature a painful revelation 
of incongruity, which generally resulted in the righting of 
his emotional over his mere intellectual being. His young 
law-friends had noticed, just at that period when the world 
was opening before him its tempting secular pursuits, a 
growing sadness and reserve about him, and could not tell 
what it meant. In vain those who knew him best inquired 
of him the secret cause of his strange behavior. He was 
frequently surprised by some of his near acquaintances, 
on his knees in church, partly hidden by some pillar 
against which he leaned, while engaged in silent medita- 
tion and prayer. 

At last the long-hidden secret came out to the light ; the 
mystery of his strange mental struggle was made clear. 
To his dearest companion and friend, the young and rising 
lawyer Henry Lacordaire said, '' Well, my mind is made up 
at last. I am going to enter the Seminary of St. Sulpice." 



1 1 6 Essays of To- Day. 



Thus ended his second struggle. First, from the un- 
thinking and mechanical religion of his childhood he 
emerged into the stormy doubts of youth, — doubts which 
were as necessary to reveal to him the truth, as the dark- 
ness is necessary to help us to define the light. . Then 
his spiritual nature triumphed over his mere intellectual 
powers, and this conflict ended in his determination to 
enter the Church. Once again the wave of social, politi- 
cal, and ecclesiastical progress carried him to the fore-front 
as a resolute reformer ; and again, when his radicalism 
brought him into antagonism with the Church, he hesi- 
tated for a while in the trembling balance of uncertainty, 
and for the last time threw the heavy weight of his destiny 
into the ideal life of the Church, as his imagination painted 
it, rather than into the vortex of radical State reform. 

As a seminarist, Lacordaire evinced all that rapturous 
religiousness which his fond biographers take such mani- 
fest delight in exhibiting. He came to this new life with 
something of his childish gladness and gayety of heart, as if, 
now for ever, he had found his true sphere, and was never 
any more to be tortured with a doubt. After three years 
and a half, in the 25th year of his age, he was ordained a 
priest, and wrote home to his mother, " The great desire 
of my life is at last accomphshed. I am at last a priest, 
' Sacerdos in sternum secundem ordinem Melchisedec' " 

Then came the question of what his life's work was to 
be. He thought at first of the missionary call, with its ad- 
venturous pioneer field. A sudden and unexpected honor, 
however, awaited him. ''You are too bright a fellow to 
waste upon the heathen," said a witty ecclesiastic from the 



Lacordaire. WJ 



south of France ; *' sit down by me now, while I tell you 
I am going to make a cardinal of you ! " Hereupon he 
informed him that he had been nominated to be auditor 
of the Rota at the court of Rome. A first-class, brilliant 
Frenchman was needed, to supply this place at the court 
of the Vatican, whose final end, in all human probabihty, 
would be the cardinalate. Lacordaire's legal ability and 
forensic acquirements fitted him for the post ; and so M. 
Boyer, the priest in charge of the nomination, saw a Provi- 
dence in the thing, and offered the place to the young 
seminarist. But, to. the surprise of all, the young Lacor- 
daire replied that he had entered the Church to be a 
preacher, and not an ecclesiastic noble. Already he felt 
himself called to be a " religious," and he would not inter- 
rupt the current of his life's vocation by such a dazzling 
offer as this. 

This incident, however, was never known until after 
Lacordaire's death. With his accustomed modesty he had 
never told any one that he had refused the rank of Mon- 
signore, with the sure prospect of a bishopric. After this 
he became chaplain to a convent of visitation nuns, and 
quietly pursued his theological studies, beginning a long 
and various correspondence with the celebrated Madame 
Swetchine and others of the Galilean Church, — which 
wonderful correspondence covers manifold experiences of 
his inner life, and forms a great and interesting portion 
of his published biography. Then there returned a wave of 
his earlier experience. He had arrived at the fullest belief 
in the Catholic Church, through social and political doubts 
and struggles. As one of his biographers tells us, from 



1 8 Essays of To- Day. 



the necessity of society he had inferred the necessity of the 
Church by these easy steps : there can be no society with- 
out religion, no reUgion without Christianity, no Christian- 
ity without the CathoUc Church. The problem of the free 
State and the free Church as it existed in the United States 
was constantly before his mind. From the days of the 
Avignon popes, the liberties of the Galilean Church, as 
opposed to the ultramontanism of the Vatican, had been 
an inherited tradition to every vigorous French mind. 
Already in the celebrated newspaper, " L'Avenir," the 
Abbe de Lamennais and Count Montalembert had written 
very plainly concerning French national Catholicism ; and 
now there loomed up before the religious and the patriotic 
mind of Lacordaire the vision of a mission of liberation for 
France, such as O'Connell effected for Ireland. " Who is 
there," he said, " who, at moments when the state of his 
own country saddens him, has not turned his eyes towards 
the republic of Washington } Who has not, in fancy at 
least, sat down to rest under the shadow of her forests and 
her laws } Weary with the spectacle I beheld in France, 
it was on that land that I cast my eyes ; and thither I re- 
solved to go, to ask a hospitality she has never refused to 
a traveller or a priest." 

He had secured the consent of his archbishop and his 
friends, and was busied with the final preparation of his 
plans, when a strong appeal was made to him to remain 
and share in an undertaking at once Catholic and national, 
which might liberate the French Church from the ecclesias- 
tical absolutism of the hour, and bring about the regenera- 
tion of society. A band of patriotic souls had established 



Lacordaire. 119 



the newspaper ''L'Avenir," for this very purpose, and La- 
cordaire was wanted to throw into it his enthusiastic spirit. 
He therefore at the last relinquished his project of sail- 
ing to the United States. We now approach the great 
crisis of his life. Once after this, in the revolution of 1848, 
he appeared upon the stage again as a politician, but it was 
not in the fresh and eager way in which he threw himself 
into the movement of 1830. 

The movement of the free newspaper, the "Journal 
I'Avenir," was begun by the concerted action of the Abbe 
Lamennais, Montalembert, and Lacordaire. It had been 
the essay of Lamennais, " Sur I'lndifference," which had 
brought back the young lawyer to the Christian fold, and 
had decided the question of his future vocation. The jour- 
nal had for its motto " God and Liberty," and its authors 
started out plainly to reform Catholic opinion in France, 
and unite it with the liberal progress of the age. Lacor- 
daire was then twenty-eight years of age, and, though a 
devoted ecclesiastic, never wore this dress in the streets, 
seeming, after all, most at home in the hurly-burly con- 
fusion of the printing room. 

But soon the free press was on the rocks. An article 
written by Lacordaire, which was supposed to reflect upon 
Louis Philippe, caused the editors to appear before the 
court. But Lacordaire pleaded his cause with so much 
patriotic eloquence that the editors w^ere acquitted. 

Then they entered into a new enterprise, and gave notice 
that they would open a free school in Paris ; which they 
began in May, 1831. But the police came down upon them, 
and Count Montalembert was accused before a court of 



120 Essays of To- Day. 



nobles, and fined. Following this, came the Papal censure 
which Gregory XVI. issued in the fall of .1832, which for- 
bade utterly the regeneration of society, or the liberties of 
the Galilean Church, in any such way as these French 
editors had in mind. 

Before this, however, they made a pilgrimage together to 
Rome, to try and secure from the Holy Father in person a 
vindication of their efforts. Together they travelled to 
Rome, but the effect of their visit upon them broke up this 
triumvirate. After being coldly and suspiciously received 
at the Vatican, Lamennais gave up entirely all hope of any 
reform in the Church, and broke away in a manly wrath 
from his companions and from the Church of Rome as a 
hopeless clog upon the age. Montalembert took the re- 
proof in silence ; but the sensitive feelings of Lacordaire 
were aroused by the sights and pageants and traditions of 
the city upon the Seven Hills, and in a moment of peni- 
tential sorrow he retracted his errors and supplicated 
forgiveness from the Holy Father whom he had incensed. 
As Montalembert says, in his life of Lacordaire, " The 
miseries, the infirmities, inseparable from the mingling of 
every thing human with that which is divine, did not escape 
his notice, but they seemed lost in the mysterious splendor 
of tradition and authority. He, the journalist, the citizen 
of 1830, — he, the democratic liberal, — had comprehended 
at the first glance, not only the inviolable majesty of the 
supreme pontificate, but its difficulties, its long and patient 
designs, its indispensable regard for men and things here 
below." 

As Lacordaire wandered over the city of Rome, and saw 



Lacordaire. 1 2 1 



its bewildering panorama of churchly prestige and power, 
again the intellect gave way before the imagination. " Do 
not let us chain down our hearts to our mere ideas," he 
said, as he found that, after all, it was his heart which was 
identified with the cause of the Church, and only his intel- 
lect with the free-church theory. 

In his subsequent repl}^ to Lamennais, — a reply which 
he made to defend his position as a devoted Catholic, a 
reply which even his best friends considered his weakest 
work, compared with the strong positions taken by his 
former friend and companion, — he rapturously exclaims : 
" O Rome ! it was thus that I beheld thee seated amid the 
storms of Europe ! I saw no anxiety on thy brow, and 
no distrust on thyself ; thy glance turned to the four quar- 
ters of the world, followed with sublime discernment the 
development of human affairs in their connexion with 
those that are divine ; whilst the tempest left thee calm 
because the spirit of God breathed in thee. . . . O Rome ! 
God knows I did not mistake thee because I found no 
kings prostrate at thy gates ! I kissed thy dust with joy 
and unutterable reverence, for thou didst appear to me 
what thou truly art, — the benefactress of the human race 
during past ages, its hope for the future, the only great 
thing still left in Europe, the captive of universal jealousy, 
the queen of the world. A suppliant pilgrim, I brought 
back from thee, not gold or perfume or precious stones, 
but something rarer and more unknown, the treasure of 
truth ! " To the Protestant mind such a confession seems 
pitiable ; but when we remember the wealth of this man's 
faith, and the way in which he believed that the Roman 



122 Essays of To- Day. 



Church was the only connecting link between heaven and 
earth ; when we bear in mind his past unbelief, and the 
depression which came upon his nature when he was in 
uncertainty and gloom, lacking the voice of authority as the 
very basis of his imagination to work upon, — we can the 
better understand something of his sacrifice and struggle, 
and something of that peace which came to him in the cer- 
tain consciousness that he was one with the past centu- 
ries of Church authority. It was the waif idea, the sense 
of loneliness and isolation, banishing him from the past 
company of the saints and the hopes and capabilities of 
the Roman communion, which made him after all relig- 
iously homesick until he was once more well established 
in her field. 

His after life is the life of a religious recluse and a popu- 
lar orator. Once again, in the storm which broke over 
Europe in 1848, he appeared for a short time as a member 
of the National Assembly. In Paris he received sixty-two 
thousand votes, and went into the Assembly as a ** Repub- 
lican of to-morrow," in the place of a " Republican of yes- 
terday." These technical party-names had reference to 
the character of the new republicanism as opposed to that 
which had gone before. Three bishops and eleven priests 
were elected at the same time with him. Together they 
favored, with De Tocqueville, a constitutional monarchy of 
a liberal and limited form, rather than a universal republic. 
To have an organ of this modified republican sentiment, 
Father Lacordaire, with several others, again started a 
newspaper, known as the " Ere Nouvelle," which was to 
belong to no party, but was to speak the truth with tern- 



Lacordaire. 123 



perance and conservatism. This last paper flourished for 
a while, but in fickle France, with her changing fortunes, 
such a golden age could not long endure ; and after a short 
career it died, and Lacordaire resigned his seat in the 
National Assembly, where, with his white Dominican habit, 
he had been a very striking figure in the make-up of its per- 
sonnel. It remains for us to consider Lacordaire's subse- 
quent history as a '' religious," and as a pulpit orator. 

From this time to his death, in 1861, he is best known 
by his biographers as the devoted priest and popular 
preacher, and the restorer of the Dominican Order in 
France. The Oratory and its system, which Charles de Con- 
dren had established in the sixteenth century, the work of 
the Lazarist Fathers, and the retreats at Port Royal in the 
days of Madame Guyon, along with the preaching powers 
of Fenelon, seemed alternately to occupy and influence the 
mind of the now re-established Lacordaire. 

He declined successively the position of Professor at Lou- 
vain, and the editorship of the paper known as " L'Univers," 
in the acknowledged interests of the Ultramontane party. 
When first he attempted to preach, either by self-conscious- 
ness or by the checkered experiences of his past career, he 
failed signally, so that a few of his friends and admirers 
began to mistrust him as a broken-down priest. But after 
this mortifying experience, he began his series of Confer- 
ences in Paris, which finally ended in his public elevation 
as the installed preacher at Notre Dame Cathedral. 

Then followed the most enthusiastic acknowledgment 
of his oratorical powers. At times the vast crowd would 
stand for hours at the unopened gates of the Cathedral, — 



124 Essays of To-Day . 



citizens, nobles, Deists, Protestants, — all alike waiting to 
hear the stream of eloquence which in those famous Con- 
ferences poured from his lips in the presence of the clergy 
and the Archbishop of Paris. Calvin at GencA^a, John Knox 
at Edinburgh, Savonarola in the Duomo of Florence, and 
Peter the Hermit with his call to preach the crusades, were 
not more completely the governing autocrats of their vary- 
ing constituencies, than was Lacordaire the rage and the 
passion of admiring Paris. On one occasion, after the 
sacred edifice had re-echoed to the applause of the multi- 
tude, the archbishop sought the priest to congratulate him 
upon his marvellous success, but the preacher who had 
disappeared so suddenly could nowhere be found. At last 
he was found in a hidden cell, weeping before an upraised 
crucifix. " My brother," said his friend, " why weep now ; 
why upon your knees at this moment of success '^. " *' Ah," 
replied Lacordaire, '* it is all this success that I am so much 
afraid of ! " 

This was the premonition of that which was to come 
after. In the midst of all this glory he suddenly surprised 
every one by renouncing his position as preacher of Notre 
Dame, and by going to Rome with the purpose of entering 
the Dominican Order, for the sake of re-establishing it in 
France. From this time on, his life shows us an entire 
renunciation of will and purpose to that which he consid- 
ered to be the highest of all earthly motives, — sacrifice 
and submission to the vows and requirements of his order. 
From time to time he emerged from his secluded cell, to 
preach an Advent or Lenten course at Notre Dame, and 
at Lyons, and other cities throughout France. 



Lacordaire. 125 



But finally, when the imperial government of Napoleon 
III. found some fault with his freedom of speech and pow- 
erful influence, he resolved never again to preach in Paris, 
and henceforth until the day of his death held his Con- 
ferences in other cities. The shaven head and white habit 
of the Dominican Father were no longer seen in the 
great French metropoHs, to the grief of his admiring fol- 
lowers ; for Lacordaire determined never more to cross 
swords with the fickle and arbitrary power of the State. 
His '* inner life," as revealed by the interesting work of 
Pierre Chocarne, reveals to us the extravagances and painful 
self-inflicted tortures of a St. Benedict in his cell, or a St. 
Francis with his mystical excesses. From this time on, to 
the day of his death, his life reads like any conventional 
life of Roman Catholic sainthood, with here and there 
bright gleams of what the nature might have been, but for 
this strange and unnatural self-crucifixion. 

We know this man best by his discourses ; we read his 
wonderful utterances as they came from him in the pulpit : 
and in this way he is a power to us, while we forget the 
strange and unhappy martyrdom of a self-crucified life. 
Let me quote at random a few of these passages as they 
are found in his published discourses. Here is the way 
in which, speaking of the empire of Jesus Christ, he called 
forth the tears of his hearers in Notre Dame: — 

" Yet with all this, we are forced to admit that, as we journey 
through life in pursuit of affection, whatever we win, it is but in an 
imperfect manner which leaves our hearts bleeding. And even if 
we were to obtain it perfectly in this life, what would remain to us 
of it after death ? Some friendly prayers would indeed follow us 



126 Essays of To-Day 



out of this world ; some kindly voice would still presen'e our mem- 
ory, and occasionally pronounce our name : but erelong heaven 
and earth would take another step fonvard, silence and forgetful- 
ness would descend upon us, and from the distant shore no ethe- 
real breeze of aftection would be wafted over our tomb. It is over, 
over for ever : and such is the history of human love ! But I am 
\^Tong. There is a Man whose ashes after eighteen centuries have 
not gro\^TL cold ; who is every day bom anew in the memory of 
countless multitudes : who is \isited in His tomb by shepherds and 
by kings, who vie one with another in offering Him their homage. 
There is a ^lan whose steps are continually being tracked, and 
who, withdrawn as He is from our bodily eyes, is still discerned 
by those who unweariedly haunt the spots where once He so- 
journed, and who seek Him on His mother's knees, by the 
borders of the lake, on the mountain top. in the secret paths 
among the valleys, under the shadow of the olive-trees, or in the 
silence of the desert. There is a ]\Ian who has died and been 
buried, but whose sleeping and waking is still watched by us ; 
whose every word still vibrates in our hearts, producing there 
something more than love, for it gi\'es life to those virtues of which 
love is the mother. There is a Man who, long ages ago, was fast- 
ened to a gibbet ; and that ]\Ian is every day taken do\\i\ from 
the throne of His passion by thousands of adorers. There is a 
IMan who was once scourged, slain, and crucified, but whom an 
ineffable passion has raised from death and infamy, and made the 
object of an unfailing love, which finds all in Him, — peace, honor, 
joy j nay, ecstasy. There is a ]\Ian who, pursued to death in His 
o^^^l time ^\ith unextinguishable hate, has demanded apostles and 
mart}TS from each successive generation, and has never failed to 
find them. There is one Man, and one alone, who has estab- 
lished His love upon earth ; and it is Thou, oh, my Jesus 1 Thou 
who hast been pierced, to bajtize, to anoint, to consecrate me in 
Thy love ; and whose very name at this moment suffices to move my 
whole being, and to tear firom me these words in spite of myself." 



Lacordaire. 127 



His habit of constructing an argument was philosophical 
and intuitional. In his series of discourses on Jesus Christ, 
he very finely constructs his argument on. the public power 
of Christ with these foundation sentences : " No being 
can manifest itself save by the elements contained within 
itself, which constitute its nature. Now all beings, of 
what kind soever, contain but three elements ; namely, 
substance, force, and law, — substance, which is their cen- 
tre of being ; force, which is their action ; law, which is 
the measure of their action. Substance, force, and law, 
all these are in an atom ; all these are in God, who is the 
Father of the atom." 

His closing sentence in the panegyric upon Daniel 
O'Connell contains the very soul of rhetoric. Speaking of 
those who were their leaders in the Church, he says : " Let 
us follow even from afar, but with faith, the glorious footsteps 
we have just surveyed ; and if already you feel this desire ; 
if the vain shadows of the past lessen in your mind ; if your 
strength grows greater, and with it a presentiment that you 
will not be useless in the cause of the Church and mankind, 
— ah ! do not seek the reason ; say to yourselves that God 
has for once spoken to you by the soul of O'Connell." 

His pathos was wonderful. I quote a passage from one 
of his discourses on God, which has become fairly classi- 
cal: "Oh, visages of the saints! Gentle, yet firm lips, 
accustomed to name the name of God, and kiss the Cross 
of His Son ; regards full of kindness and love, which per- 
ceived a brother in the most poor and lowly of creatures ; 
hair silvered by meditation on eternity, sacred rays of the 
soul resplendent in old age and in death, — happy are those 



128 Essays of To- Day. 



who have beheld them ! more happy those who have un- 
derstood them, and received from their transfigured glebe 
lessons of wisdom and immortality ! " 

In a discourse on the existence of God, he thus speaks 
of the intuitional argument : '' God has on His side Nat- 
ure, intelligence, conscience, and society. . . . We have, 
too, a threefold intuition of God : a negative intuition in 
Nature ; a direct intuition in the ideas of truth and justice ; 
a practical intuition in human society." 

Here is an extract from his discourse on the crea- 
tion of the world : " I believe that this life is a road, thcLt 
this light is a shadow, that this world is a prelude. And 
I believe with all my soul, at the price of my blood if 
needful, that God has created us to live by Him, to^ be 
enlightened by Him, to find in Him the substance of all 
that we see, is but an incapable and a painful image .... 
Yes, we all suffer; woe to him that denies it! but we 
suffer from the road, not from life. For my part, born to 
sorrow like the rest, charged with the two wounds of my 
forefathers, — anguish of soul and infirmity of body, — I 
bless God, who has made me and who waits for me, I am 
not to be consulted by Him about my condition ; between 
the nothingness from which He called me and the eternity 
He has promised me, the choice is doubtful only to parri- 
cidal folly, and God should have counted upon my virtue 
as He counted upon my goodness." 

Oftentimes he paints his own experiences, as in the fol- 
lowing passage : — 

" After these long torments of doubt, if the veil be at last drawn 
aside, then the intelligence receives one of those vibrations whose 



Lacordaire. 129 



voluptuous pain no tongue can describe. Then Augustine arises, 
and for the first time, finding even firiendship irksome, he with- 
draws to give current to his feelings in a torrent of solitary teats. 
He, who was lost in the vain love of glory and creatures, sees all 
the charms that deceived his youth vanish in a moment. Truth 
enraptured him ; the azure plains of Lombardy, the hopes of re- 
nown, the most tender professions of erring hearts, have no longer 
any power to move him ; he departs, leading his aged mother by 
the hand, and already from the port of Ostia he sees the obscure 
solitude, which he thinks will hide him for ever from the admiration 
of the world, as from the dreams of his past fife. Tears of great 
men, heroic sacrifices, virtues born in a single hour and which 
ages cannot destroy, you teach us the price of truth ! You prove 
that it is indeed the perfection and beatitude of the intelligence ! 

" Two systems of philosophy dispute for empire : religious and 
traditional philosophy, and rational or critical philosophy. The 
first, even when it is mixed up with errors, settles minds and founds 
nations ; the second, even when it affirms a portion of truth, de- 
stroys what the other builds up. 

'' In a word, God, who is truth, has made Himself known to us 
by three revelations which are but one : by ideas, by the universe, 
and by language. Whoever breaks the bonds that unite these, 
confuses and divides the light that lightens every man that cometh 
into the world ; he condemns himself to a state of ignorance which 
knowledge does but increase ; he will live at hazard like a being 
without principle or end, because he will voluntarily have abdi- 
cated, with truth, — that is to say, with the knowledge of God, — 
the highest means given us to accomplish our destiny ; which is 
to tend towards God, and, by imitating Him, to obtain the per- 
fection of His nature and the beatitude of His eternal Hfe." 

Here again is undoubtedly another leaf from his. own 
inmost feelings : " God recognizes in His saints the apos- 
tles, the martyrs, the virgins, the doctors, the hermits, the 



130 Essays of To-Day. 



hospitallers, who have before confessed Him and served 
Him in the tribulations of the world. The saints, in their 
turn, recognize in God the being to whom they gave their 
undivided love in the time of their sufferings and their lib- 
erty. Nothing is foreign to them in the sentiments which 
they feel ; nothing is new to them in their heart. They love 
Him whom they have chosen ; they enjoy Him to whom they 
have given themselves ; they ardently embrace Him whom 
they already possessed ; their love expands in the certainty 
and joy of their union : but it is not separated from the 
stalk that bore it. God gathers, but he does not detach 
it ; He crowns, but does not change it." 

The following introduction to his discourse on man as 
a moral being, is a characteristic example of his elo- 
quence : — 

" Before entering upon this grave subject, gentlemen, I have 
two requests to address to you. I pray you, first, never to applaud 
me, whatever may be the sentiment that moves your hearts. Not 
that I do not comprehend the involuntary movement which, even 
at the feet of altars, causes an assembly to stand up in unanimous 
witness of its sympathy and its faith. But although on certain 
occasions their acclamations might appear excusable, so much do 
they spring with piety firom the souls of an auditory, neverthe- 
less I conjure you to respect the constant tradition of Christendom, 
which is to respond to the word of God only by the silence of love 
and the immobility of respect. You owe this to God ; you owe 
it also, perhaps, to him who speaks to you in His name. Al- 
though he may not have been tempted into pride by your applause, 
he may be suspected of not being insensible to it : it may be sup- 
posed that, instead of giving freely to you that which he has freely 
received, he comes to seek its price in the glory of popularity, — a 



Lacordaire, 1 3 1 



recompense sometimes honorable but always fragile ; and still more 
fragile, more vain, between those who receive and him who gives 
the lessons of eternity. 

" The second request I would address to you, is in favor of a 
nation to which, on more than one occasion, I have already ap- 
proved my respectful attachment. Yesterday, three noble sons of 
Poland visited me : they told me that four thousand of their com- 
panions, after fifteen years of exile, were about to approach their 
country with the consent of France, which opens to them her 
gates j and of Germany, which permits them to pass through her 
territory. They asked me, after having obtained permission from 
the chief of this diocese, here present, to beg of you a last proof 
of your pious fraternity ; for if time has respected their glory and 
not lessened their courage, it has left them those precious remains 
and nothing more. I bent before their desire as before their mis- 
fortune : I present them to you together. You will not give them 
alms ; for, although that word is dear to your Christian hearts, 
there are times when the heroism of misfortune constrains you to 
seek a higher tithe. You will not pay them tribute ; although that 
word supposes a debt, and a debt of an important character, yet 
it does not sufficiently express the unction of Christian language. 
Therefore, borrowing an expression of the Middle Ages, I ask you 
to give them a viaticiwi ; that is to say, the travelling pay given in 
those times to the members of religious orders, and to the knights 
who went to combat for the emancipation of Christendom. 

" You will give a viaticum to these sons of another hallowed ' 
land ; to these soldiers of another generous cause : you will give 
them the triple viaticum of honor, exile, and hope." 

Such is a brief outline of the character and career of this 
last and greatest of French orators and mystics. 

That power which he turned into the line of voluntary 
self-renunciation and self-abnegation might have shaped 
and guided the religious reform which yet awaits the future 



132 Essays of To- Day. 



of France. His successor, Hyacinthe, awaits to-day the 
verdict of posterity. 

Lacordaire's life shows us a certain amount of mental 
strength and intellectual brilliancy, joined to deep religious 
reverence and devotion. His character exhibits a great 
versatility of gifts, moral and spiritual ; but at the same 
time we can clearly see in him an instability which was 
sadly weakening and destructive of moral force. A little 
less faith and reverence for the past ; a little more knowl- 
edge of the world, and more cosfnopohtanism of spirit, — 
would in all probability have thrown him into the seeth- 
ing political world, where he might have been seen in the 
succession of Thiers, Guizot, Coquerel, and Gambetta. 
But his superabundant imagination continually made him 
assume that the Church of Rome, with its ultramontane 
claims, was the one fixed and settled fact in the changing 
and uncertain condition of Europe ; and when he could 
not stand alone, and feared the atheistic drift of political 
radicalism, his heart spoke up and called his mental strug- 
gles mere ideas, so that he felt the Christian above all 
things must have a detached heart, which must chain 
down his ideas alone ; and thus he yielded, as Edmund 
Burke says all men yield, by falling on the side of their 
natural propensities. Only, in the case of Lacordaire, 
these very natural -propensities were in themselves relig- 
ious propensities. 



Representative Men of the English Church. 133 



VI. 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN OF THE ENGLISH 
CHURCH. 

KEBLE. — MARSH. — ROBERTSON. 

T ORD MACAULAY has compared the English Con- 
stitution, with its many defects and its curious out- 
growth of precedents, to a venerable wall, so overgrown 
with ivy and creeping vines, that to tear out the intruding 
vine is to destroy the old wall itself. To eradicate the de- 
fects growing out of the English Constitution is to destroy 
it ; and, therefore, to save it, and yet preserve its identity, 
the tender pruning-knife of the cautious conservative, 
not the axe of the radical laid to the root of the tree, is 
needed. 

This illustration of Macaulay is as true with reference 
to the Church as it is to the State. It is the question Mr. 
Gladstone asked, some time ago, in his article entitled, " Is 
the Church of England Worth Preserving t " Would it 
be better to let the ancient regime go to pieces, and then 
erect a new system out of the old elements ; or is it pos- 
sible upon the old foundation to reconstruct the edifice } 
To understand the subject before us, we must look at the 
problem of the Church of England as a triangle. Which- 
ever line you take as your base, there are the other two 



134 Essays of To- Day. 



sides and the three angles. All who are in that Church, 
must be somewhere within the triangle. And yet, like 
the sheet seen in the vision of Simon Peter at Joppa, there 
are all manner of souls enclosed in its communion, and 
sheltered by the width of its creeds and articles. Pusey 
and Ryle, Maurice and Hugh McNeil, Dean Stanley and 
the Earl of Shaftesbury, John Keble and Frederick W. 
Robertson, William Marsh and Father Ignatius, the de- 
scendants of Newman, who plead for " Tract No. XC." 
and the defenders of the " Essays and Reviews," — all fly 
home to the Church and her articles, as doves fly home 
to their dove-cotes in a storm, and know their places and 
the paths which lead to them, in the same instinctive way 
in which the animals found their way to the ark in Noah's 
time. Or, to come back to our mathematical figure, they 
know full well which is their base in the Church, and which 
are but the other two sides. 

The Church of England has been a national growth. 
Cranmer, we know, steered its way through a reformation 
which was not a revolution, and thus preserved all that was 
good in the historic Church of the centuries past, and 
never surrendered the possession of the house, or gave up 
the title-deed of the Anglican Church to Rome. 

Then, at the Reformation period, while Luther and Cal- 
vin, and Melancthon and Zwinglius, and English Non-con- 
formists were making new churches, Latimer and Ridley 
and Richard Hooker were refurnishing the old homestead, 
— making that house English and Protestant, which before 
had been Romish and corrupt. 

At the very beginning, then, of the English national 



Representative Men of the English Chnrch. 135 

Church there sprang up, naturally and inevitably, two op- 
posing schools of thought. One of these looked towards 
the past and the old state of things, and clung to the 
Sacraments ; the other looked towards the new departure, 
and exalted preaching as the better means of grace. 

Under Elizabeth and Edward VI. and Charles I., that 
party, with its high views of the Church, came forward 
into prominence, with old customs revived, and with new 
rites and ceremonies. 

After the restoration of Charles II., and the re-establish- 
ment of the Church, the influence of a new school of lib- 
eralists, known as the Cambridge Platonists, was felt ; 
who, in reacting both against Puritanism and the undue 
demands of Prelacy, revived the philosophy of Plato upon 
a Christian basis. This in turn was followed by the spirit- 
ual deadness of the days of Queen Anne and the Georges. 
Then came the great awakening of Methodism, making 
itself felt in the Evangelical movement, headed by such 
men as Cecil, Simeon, Romaine, Bickersteth, and Legh 
Richmond. And then, in our own day, there has come 
another later budding of this same historic tree. The phi- 
losophy of Coleridge has reproduced itself in the Church 
of England, and has given an impetus to philosophical and 
critical study, which shows itself to-day in a third school 
of thought, known as Broad-charchmanship. Here then, 
in this same national Church, we perceive three tenden- 
cies, — towards the priestly, pastoral, and student types 
of ministry. We notice three distinct phases of Church- 
life, — the tendency towards institutionalism ; the tendency 
towards a directly spiritual conception of our relationship 



136 Essays of To- Day. 



to Christ, and of our whole religious life, as individualism ; 
and the tendency towards critical inquiry and philosophical 
accuracy, and the widening of the Church by reducing its 
dogmatic basis. 

Dr. Bushnell, in his third chapter of " Nature and the 
Supernatural," shows the distinction between "Powers" 
and " Things ; " and argues that the " Powers " — man, 
and the angels and superterrestrial intelligences — are, 
after all, the principal magnitudes ; that Nature is only a 
field for the powers, and that God has created us, not for 
one dead level, one uniform standard of character, but 
that in our diversity of nature we may reflect some portion 
of the Divine Mind, and give forth each some individual 
particle of truth, — just as each raindrop in the sunshine 
helps to form the perfect bow. With this thought as our 
guide to open the door of our subject, let us leave the 
dogmatic schools, and notice the character of three repre- 
sentative men, who, in the attractiveness of their private 
lives and habits of thought, exhibit the respective phases 
of their Church-life. I have taken them, not because they 
were in any sense the leaders of their party, but simply 
because they were "powers," — each in their own way. I 
refer to John Keble, William Marsh, and Frederick W. 
Robertson. 

I. The motto of Scripture which Keble has placed at 
the beginning of his " Christian Year," is the simplest 
and truest exponent of the man himself: "In quietness 
and in confidence shall be your strength." His preface to 
that book of hymns is also the very mirror of the inner 
man. The high and sober standard of feelings in matters 



Representative Men of the English Chnrch, 137 

of practical religion, as connected with the authorized 
formularies and liturgy of the Prayer-book, is the one 
cardinal doctrine upon which his religious character and 
experience are hung. The key-note with him is the dear 
Mother Church. His soul basked in its memories and 
reverent traditions. He loved to be known, only as a 
parish priest of the Church of England ; and, in the still- 
ness and seclusion of Hursley Vicarage, he cared not for 
the restless activity of the present generation. He seemed 
to forget that he sustained any other relation, to the world 
around him, than that of the parish clergyman, whose duty 
it was rightly and duly to administer the Holy Sacraments, 
and faithfully preach the word of God. He was a true 
son of the Church, — belonging to the old Cavalier school 
of Charles I., believing in " divine right," and seeing in the 
Church the complement of the State. His hymns for the 
Gunpowder-plot, the death of King Charles the Martyr, 
and the Restoration of the royal family, show him to have 
been a faithful follower in the steps of the Primate Laud. 
In full sympathy with Pusey and the Oxford theologians ; 
rejoicing in spirit at the prospect of a Catholic revival, 
which was in some way to link once more the wandering 
Anglican, with the sister-churches of the Greek and Roman 
communion ; holding to the strongest views of priestly 
power, — he is still loved by every Christian heart familiar 
with English song; his hymns are the household thoughts 
of every Christian family, and are the richest legacy of holy 
hymnody we have had, since the days of George Herbert 
and Henry Vaughan. That Keble held to the highest 
interpretation of the Sacraments, which the school of New- 



Essays of To- Day 



man and Pusey could devise, is evident from the entire 
theology of "The Christian Year." It is generally con- 
ceded now, I believe, that, according to his dying request, 
a single line in his hymn on the Gunpowder-plot has been 
changed by one of his executors, so as to read (with refer- 
ence to the Eucharist), — 

" Here present in the heart, 
As in the hand.''' 

It read before, in the earlier editions, — 

" Here present in the heart, 
A'ot in the hand." 

And yet, though fully sympathizing with that party which 
has been striving to restore the visible unity of the visible 
Church, — to secure which result Pusey had sent forth his 
'' Eirenicon," — he was never seen in the dust of the strug- 
gle ; his talents, which were shown by his career at Oxford, 
were seldom if ever used for the positive advancement of 
the Oxford reform ; and he stands before us as one whose 
powers were consecrated to that which he considered his 
life-call, — the parish work of Hursley. 

In one of his letters home, John Coleridge Patterson, — = 
the faithful young martyr and Bishop of the IVIelanesian 
Islands, — writes as follows, full of his earlier impressions of 
the Oxford leaders : " I cannot quite understand Dr. Pusey's 
position ; I am troubled at his coming out in public so much. 
There is to me something more like Dr. Pusey in the 
thought of a wise, learned, holy man, moving men's con- 
sciences, and informing their minds by books, sermons, and 
direct influence through the very many men who seek his 



Representative Men of the English Chtireh. 139 

advice." Surely this regret could not apply to Keble, whose 
garments were never soiled in the dust and strife of the 
ecclesiastical arena. 

Keble stands before us, then, as one who, by training, 
temperament, and tradition, was a thorough defender of the 
High-Church position. He was a man whose life was pure 
and true and holy ; one who chained down his speculations 
to the rock of his simple faith in the historic Christ of the 
Ages, and who cast out the spirit of doubt, as the disciples 
cast out devils, by a resolute appeal to the all-powerful 
Spirit of God. He stands before the Christian Church as 
a man whose convictions were mellowed by prayerfulness 
and piety,- whose gentleness made him truly great, and 
whose actions were always anointed with the fragrance 
and purity of a noble nature. 

" Nor ever narrowness, or spite. 
Or villain fancy fleeting by, 
Drew in the expression of an eye 
Where God and Nature met in light ! " 

2. The Rev. William Marsh is our representative of the 
Evangelical or Low-Church school. His memoir — which 
was published some ten years ago by his daughter, the 
author of " English Hearts and Hands," and the " Life of 
Hedley Vicars " — portrays to us the inner heart of this 
earnest phase of Christian life. 

Miss Marsh has become widely known throughout Great 
Britain, by her efforts to better the spiritual condition of 
the thousands of workmen, who, in the building of the 
Crystal Palace at Sydenham, were brought in direct com- 
munication with her father's family, at Beckenham Rectory. 



140 Essays of To- Day, 



Throughout this memoir, there are constant allusions to 
the workingmen's classes and Bible-readings, which have 
become so well known to the readers of " Hedley Vicars " 
and *' The Victory Won." And it has been because of its 
influence over these masses, that this evangelical phase of 
Church-life has been such a power. Of course, we are 
familiar with the objections to this school. It is said to 
be superficial and emotional and narrow. It was severely 
handled in that sarcastic paper, " The Comedy of Convoca- 
tion." The Rev. Lavender Kids continually answers Arch- 
deacon Jolly and the other debaters with the well-known 
formula, — ** The Bible, the Bible, and nothing but the 
Bible ! " 

A certain English reviewer, in commenting upon this 
life of Dr. Marsh, remarks that it would be more reada- 
ble, if it had not so much of an evangelical dialect. This 
may be very true ; but it is only an old objection in a new 
form. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes complains of what he 
calls the polarization of certain words and phrases by Chris- 
tian people ; by which he means that they change the use 
of words, or give them an arbitrary and conventional sig- 
nificance. And it is owing to the fact that the author of 
" Ecce Homo," a few years ago, broke through the habit 
of using arbitrarily-chosen religious expressions, that his 
presentation of old and well-known truths appeared so 
fresh and attractive. 

But the question of "cant" is a matter inwrought in hu- 
man nature, and not necessarily in this or that distinctive 
phase of Church-life. The Romanist and the Unitarian 
have each their cant, when they live in their ruts. Cant 



Representative Men of the English Church. 141 

is not alone a specialty of the Evangelicals. It may be a 
religious malaria peculiar to their district : but they are not 
all down with it on that account. 

It was in the bright scene of a ball-room, that Marsh 
was first to hear the voice of God, speaking with power to 
his soul, by the sudden death of a young friend at his side. 
He bought, in his subsequent distress of mind, a Roman 
Catholic book of devotion, but found no comfort from it. 
After reading the autobiography of John Newton, he began 
a diligent reading of the Scriptures ; and finally appeared 
before the Rev. Richard Cecil as a candidate for the min- 
istry. After a series of changes, during which he was in 
fullest sympathy with Legh Richmond, and Simeon of 
Cambridge, he ended his quiet, uneventful career at Bed- 
dington Rectory. Early in the days of the Oxford move- 
ment. Dr. Marsh corresponded with some of its chief 
leaders on the subject of the Reformation ; and, in a letter 
addressed to Dr. Pusey on this subject, he stated his own 
creed, with regard to that cardinal doctrine Justification 
by Faith, in the following words :" We are justified freely 
by grace, meritoriously by Christ, instrumentally by faith, 
evidentially by good works." To the third clause of this, 
objection was made ; and the sentence, ''Instrumentally by 
the sacrament of baptism," was finally substituted. And 
yet, though he was very positive on matters of conviction, 
he had a strong individuality of character, which led him 
very often to do what was right in his own eyes, without 
waiting for the sanction of his party. Kingsley, who met 
him several times at the Leamington Rectory, thus wrote 
of him : " I recollect him now, a man who had been peculi- 



142 Essays of To- Day. 



arly graceful and handsome, with the noble air. of the old 
school. Belonging to the Evangelical school, to which all 
later schools owe their vitality, he seemed no bigot, but 
ever ready to welcome novel thoughts which did not inter- 
fere with fundamental truth. He fulfilled my notion of 
what the purest German evangelicals of the last century 
must have been like, — those who, with Spener and Franke, 
reawakened vital Christianity among a dry and dead gen- 
eration given up to the letter of Lutheranism, and forgetful 
of its spirit." 

His interview with Dr. Arnold of Rugby is thus de- 
scribed by his daughter : " They met but once ; and differ- 
ing upon some points as they did, it was but the lovelier to 
see how their hearts sprang to meet each other, drawn by 
the mutual sympathy of their noble natures, and by the 
yet stronger attraction of love to their Saviour." A few 
years later, when Dr. Marsh had read with his family Dean 
Stanley's record of his friend's life and character, as he 
closed the book, he said, his eyes filled with tears : " I am 
like those boys of Arnold's : I don't know how to bear 
his loss." His death, as described by his daughter, is a 
fitting close to so pure and calm a life : "He signed for the 
windows to be opened wide, and the sunshine came stream- 
ing in on his heavenly face. After the heavy rain in the 
night, every thing was looking refreshed and lovely ; and 
the clematis then in blossom, which hung round the library 
window, was ghttering in the sun as it formed the frame 
through which he took his last look into the garden. He 
lay tranquilly, surrounded by those who loved him best. 
Then, with serene dignity and almost a leisurely calm, 



Representative Men of the English Church, 143 

he raised his hand and closed his own eyes, to spare us 
one pang, and to draw the curtain that would hide earth 
from his sight ; and thus, as the church-bells began to 
chime for the service, with a few gentle breathings his 
spirit passed away." 

Surely, the Church of England owes to the lives and 
influence of such men as these a debt of gratitude, for the 
simplicity and purity of their holy examples. The Evan- 
gelical school has ever guarded most strictly the very 
heart of Christianity, in its unfaltering demand for the 
supremacy of personal religion over every other phase of 
Church-life. 

3. I have taken Robertson as the representative of the 
Broad-Church school, because his is the most attractive life 
that can be found, as the exponent of this later departure 
in the Church of England. Stanley, with his indepen- 
dence and self-reliance, or the late Canon Kingsley, or the 
Brothers Hare, or the serene and undisturbed Maurice, or 
Dr. Arnold, — all disciples of Coleridge's philosophy, would 
perhaps better represent the progressive tenets of this 
movement. In fact, it is very much to be doubted whether 
Robertson at last considered himself a disciple of any party. 
He recoiled from the so-called Oxford reformers ; he vol- 
untarily parted company from the Evangelicals, — and 
yet, strange as was his anomalous position, he was ever 
a loyal and devoted son of the Church of England. He 
was one of those persons who could rest satisfied in 
the philosophical fitness of the Establishment, but not 
in the superficial talk of mere churchiness or anti-churchi- 
ness, which were the rallying-cries and shibboleths of the 



44 Essays of To- Day. 



parties he found about him. He loved the mihtary idea 
upon which Church authority was based. Disciphne, 
obedience, command, authority, — all these conceptions, 
were to him rational, and hence rightful. In fact, the mil- 
itary idea ran throughout his entire nature, and made itself 
perceived in his carriage and conversation. His experience 
in army life was an ever fresh impulse to him, in the bick- 
erings and strifes into which it was his sad lot to fall. In 
a recently-published book, entitled " Last Leaves from the 
Journal of the Rev. JuUan Charles Young," there is a hith- 
erto-unpublished letter from Robertson, in which he speaks 
of his own profession as follows : " It certainly is the most 
quarrelsome of all professions in the matter of a blue or green 
window, prevenient moonshine, or a bishop's night-cap ; and 
the most cowardly when it comes to a matter of right and 
wrong, — of what they saw and what they did not see. 
Unless clergymen of the type I am alluding to are forced 
to serve in the army for five years previous to ordination, 
to make them men, let alone gentlemen, I think the Church 
as an establishment had better be snuffed out." Surely, 
Robertson was suffering from some stinging criticism or 
from a dyspeptic turn, when he penned these lines ! But 
he was strangely intolerant of men and measures which 
fell below his ideal. 

In Frothingham's Life of Theodore Parker, we come 
across this same combativeness, this chip-on-the-shoulder 
phase of character. It was this which led Parker on from 
one radical step to another ; while the unconcerned Sage 
of Concord — the tranquil Emerson — lived above the 
storm which his " Oversoul " teachings and Transcendental 



Representative Men of the English CJmrch. 145 

philosophy occasioned. He was always calm and unruffled 
and gentle. He lived for the after-judgment of history, 
not for the noisy verdict of the hour. And just what 
Emerson was to Parker, Maurice was to Robertson : he 
did not answer back, but quietly waited for the approving 
judgment of posterity. 

The memoir of the life of Rev. Frederick W. Robertson, 
published by the Rev. Stopford Brooke, has achieved a 
popularity almost unparalleled in the annals of biography ; 
while his lectures and sermons are to be found in every 
library, which has in it any thing like a fair proportion of 
the literature of the day. This memoir is so painfully sad, 
that at times it is a positive relief to turn from its delinea- 
tions of Robertson's real life to the lofty ideal life which 
his sermons everywhere portray. For the experiences of 
life which Robertson preached and illustrated were almost 
always drawn from his own personal consciousness, and 
not from the imagined experiences of others. Hence it 
was that his illustrations were like living pictures, for they 
were always the pictures of real life. A case of this kind 
occurs in a sermon on the Doubt of Thomas, where the re- 
corded experience of Thomas reads like a page from Robert- 
son's own diary. The sermon I refer to is No. xxi. of the 
Second Series, where the following description of his own 
life appears : " There is another class of men whose re- 
flective powers are stronger than their susceptible : they 
think out truth, they do not feel it. Often highly-gifted 
and powerful minds, they cannot rest until they have made 
all their ground certain ; they do not feel safe so long as 
there is one possibility left ; they prove all things. Such 



146 Essays of To- Day. 



a man was Thomas. He has been called the rationalist 
among the Apostles. Happy such men cannot be : an 
anxious and inquiring mind dooms its possessor to unrest. 
. . . When such men do believe, it is a belief with all the 
heart and soul for life. When a subject has been once 
thoroughly and suspiciously investigated, and settled once 
for all, the adherence of the whole reasoning man — if 
given in at all — is given frankly and heartily, as Thomas 
gave it, — ' Aly Lord and my God!'" Now, what is this 
but a confession of Robertson's own life ? Does not such 
a passage give us the philosophy of Robertson's sadness 
and nervous anxiety for far-reaching results } " Happy 
such men cannot be : an anxious and inquiring mind dooms 
its possessor to unrest I " 

Robertson's mind was one of those which, while it per- 
ceived at once the traditional difficulties in the way of 
Christianity, perceived also the underlying philosophy of 
those great truths which, because of their fitness, com- 
mended themselves to that exalted faculty which Schleier- 
macher was so pleased to call '' the religious consciousness." 
This is best shown by a sermon which comes to my mind 
almost at random as an illustration of this feature of his 
mind. It is Sermon No. vi. in vol. iii. (American edition). 
The subject is, "The Illusiveness of Life," founded on 
those words in the Epistle to the Hebrews, " By faith 
Abraham, when he was called to go out to a place which 
he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed ; and 
he went out, not knowing whither he went." There is a 
tinge of the most pathetic sadness running throughout 
the entire sermon, and yet, at the same time, there is 



Representative Men of the English Church. i/if'j 

the most unmistakable " reasonable, religious, and holy 
hope." 

No doubt there were many occult causes for that sadness 
which showed itself in Robertson's life. By temperament 
he was high-strung and sensitive. Then, too, his early re- 
ligious life was an unnatural one, and the strong reaction 
from it, is the secret of his subsequent disturbed state of 
mind. Never did St. Jerome in the desert, or St. Benedict 
in his cell at Castro Casino, lead a more thoroughly as- 
cetic and mystic life, than did Robertson at Brazennose 
College, Oxford : looking continually in upon himself in 
a morbidly-religious way, and striving to shape and 
mould his character into conformity with Henry Mar- 
tyn and David Brainerd, whose memoirs he was con- 
stantly studying. 

He began with a ripened religious life before he himself 
was ripe for it. He had to build again and more pro- 
foundly in his maturer days ; and while, in this second 
growth of knowledge he was trying to determine which 
was solid ground and which was only marshland, the 
messenger of God called him home. 

If to the working-men of Brighton, for whom he lived 
and labored, and to his heart-broken people and fellow- 
townsmen, who followed him by thousands to the grave, 
any words were ever applicable, they are those of Mrs. 
Browning, at the grave of Cowper: — 

" Oh, man ! this man in brotherhood * 
Your weary way beguiling, 
Groaned inly while he taught you peace, 
And died while you were smiling." 



148 Essays of To-Day. 



Surely, any church is worth preserving which, within an 
ecclesiastical circumference such as the Church of England 
possesses, can nourish and support such representative men 
as Keble, Marsh, and Robertson. 



Levitical Ilhistratio7t of the Atonement. 149 



VII. 



THE LEVITICAL ILLUSTRATION OF THE 
DOCTRINE OF THE ATONEMENT. 

T PROPOSE in this paper to examine the Levitical illus- 
tration of the doctrine of the Atonement, as we find the 
doctrine explained by those features of the Jewish worship, 
which culminated in the mysterious sacrificial acts of the 
great day of Atonement. 

This entire dispensation of Moses and the tabernacle, 
and the Levitical priesthood, was a great outline picture 
of the Christian system which was to come afterwards, 
just as the Christian system is an outline map of the real- 
ity which underlies it. Christ came not to destroy and 
uproot the revelation which was given upon Sinai, but 
only to fill it out and make it perfect and complete. Let 
us then study out the meaning of the Jewish day of Atone- 
ment, — outlined to us in the thick, dark clouds of smoke 
hovering over the court of the tabernacle, and in the crim- 
son line of ebbing life-blood flowing from the brazen altar, 
and dropping from the stained and bespattered priests ! 

The services connected with this great day of Atonement 
were kept upon the tenth day of the Jewish month of Tisri, 
— corresponding to our October, — five days before the 



150 ' Essays of To- Day. 



Feast of Tabernacles. Some have regarded it as a com- 
memoration of the day on which Moses came down from 
the Mount with the second tables of the Law, and pro- 
claimed to the gathered people the forgiveness of their 
great sin in worshipping the golden calf. Others have 
supposed that it was instituted on account of the sin of 
Nadab and Abihu. However this may be as to its early 
origin, we find the observances fully described in the 
Book of Leviticus. The day was kept by the people as 
a solemn Sabbath, and no work was done. It was on 
this occasion only, that the high-priest was allowed to 
enter the *' holy of holies," the innermost chamber of 
the tabernacle. Having bathed his person, and having 
dressed himself in the white linen garments, he brought 
forward a young bullock for a sin-offering, — purchased 
at his own cost on account of himself and his family, — 
and two young goats for a sin-offering, with a ram for a 
burnt-offering for the people. He then presented the 
two goats before the Lord at the door of the tabernacle 
and cast lots upon them. On one lot was written, " For 
Jehovah ; " on the other was written, " For Azazel." Then 
he sacrificed the bullock. . Next he took some of its 
blood, and, filling a censer with burning coals from the 
brazen altar, he took a handful of incense and entered into 
the " holy place." After this he threw the incense upon 
the coals, and enveloped the mercy-seat in a cloud of smoke. 
Then dipping his finger into the blood, he sprinkled it 
seven tirnes before the mercy-seat eastward. Hereupon 
the work and mission of these two doomed goats appear. 
That goat upon which the lot for Jehovah had fallen was 



Levitical Illustration of the Atonement. 1 5 1 

slain, and the " holy place " and the " holy of holies " was 
sprinkled in the same way as before. After this the high- 
priest laid his hands upon the head of the goat on which 
the lot for Azazel had fallen, and confessed over it all the 
sins of the people. The goat was then led by a man chosen 
for the purpose into the wilderness, — into a land not in- 
habited, — and was there let loose. 

It is then with this strange feature of these two goats, 
— the one offered in sacrifice, and the other sent away into 
the unknown wilderness, — that we have to do. The de- 
scription taken from Leviticus xvi. is as follows : — 

" And Aaron shall cast lots upon the two goats : one lot for the 
Lord, and the other lot for the scape-goat. And Aaron shall bring 
the goat upon which the Lord's lot fell, and offer him for a burnt- 
offering. But the goat on which the lot fell to be the scape-goat 
shall be presented alive before the Lord, to make an atonement 
with him, and to let him go for a scape-goat into the wilderness. 
And Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat, 
and confess over him all the iniquities of the children of Israel, 
and all their transgressions in all their sins, putting them upon the 
head of the goat, and shall send him away by the hand of a fit 
man into the wilderness. And the goat shall bear upon him all 
their iniquities unto a land not inhabited, and he shall let go the 
goat in the wilderness." 

We cannot enter upon the subject of the various rites 
and ceremonies of the occasion, the sacrifices and services 
of the priest, and the attendant ministration of the Levites. 
In Dean Stanley's " History of the Jewish Church," this 
entire round of ceremonies is described in such a vivid 
manner that it stands out to the memory in a way never to 
be forgotten. But I want now not to make a picture of 



52 Essays of To-Day > 



the entire scene of this strange day of Atonement, but 
to find out the meaning of this scape-goat, and the goat 
slain for the sins of the people. 

We find some curious particulars regarding this scape- 
goat in the Book of Leviticus, and in the different books 
of the Talmud. The lots by which the goats were origi- 
nally chosen were of boxwood ; but in later times they 
were of gold. Then, when the scape-goat was chosen, a 
piece of scarlet cloth was tied to his horns, in order that 
he might ever afterwards be known, and that there might 
be no possibility of a mistake. The high-priest then placed 
his hands upon the head of the goat, and offered the fol- 
lowing prayer : — 

" O Lord, the house of Israel thy people have trespassed and 
rebelled before Thee ! I beseech Thee, O Lord, forgive now their 
trespasses and sins which thy people have committed, as it is writ- 
ten in the law of Moses thy servant, saying that, In that day there 
shall be an atonement for you to cleanse you, that ye may be clean 
from all your sins before the Lord." 

The goat was then goaded and rudely treated by the peo- 
ple, till it was led away by the man appointed. As soon 
as it reached a certain spot which was regarded as the 
commencement of the wilderness, a signal was made by 
some sort of watch-fire, or runner, or telegraphic contriv- 
ance to the high-priest who waited for it. Then when the 
priest received the news that the goat had reached the 
wilderness, and had gone into the unknown waste, he read 
to the assembled people the lessons from the Law, and 
offered up some prayers. He then bathed himself, re- 



Levitical Ilhistratioji of the Atonement. 153 

sumed his colored garments, and offered up the regular 
evening sacrifices. After this he washed again, put on 
the white garments, and entered the most " holy place " for 
the fourth time, to bring out the censer and the incense 
plate. This ended the special rites of the day. 

Even so late as the time of Herod, in the days of the 
nation's slavery and at the period of the utter degeneracy 
of the Church, we find this custom of sending away the 
scape-goat still in vogue. In Dean Stanley's " History of 
the Jewish Church," at the period of Herod the Great, he 
thus describes this rite : — 

" The ceremony of the scape-goat still continued, though it had 
all the appearance of a ritual in its last stage of decadence. The 
terrified creature was conveyed from the Temple of Olivet on a 
raised bridge, to avoid the jeers of the irreverent pilgrims of Alex- 
andria, who used to pluck the poor animal's long flaxy hair, with 
the rude cries of, ' Get along ! away with you ! ' Then he was 
handed on from keeper to keeper by short stages over hill and 
valley. At each hut where he rested, an obsequious guide said 
to him, ' Here is your food ; here is your drink.' The last in this 
strange succession led him to a precipice above the fortress of 
Dok and hurled him down, and the signal was sent back to Jeru- 
salem that the deed was accomplished, by the waving of hand- 
kerchiefs all along the rocky road." 

The meaning of the goat marked "for Jehovah," and 
sacrificed in the morning, is clear and plain enough. It 
is upon this other goat, bearing the sins of the people and 
going out as a sin-bearer into the unknown wastes of the 
wilderness, that the special interest of this subject gathers. 
What was this "Azazel," for whom the scape-goat was 



154 Essays of To- Day. 



marked and to whom he was sent ? Who was he ? What 
does it all mean ? 

One interpretation is that it w^as the name of the desert- 
place to which he w^as sent. Another view is that this 
" Azazel " w^as a demon, an evil spirit belonging to the 
pre-Mosaic religion! All through the religious history of 
the race, there has appeared this unknown powder of evil. 
Sometimes it is represented as an impersonal essence; at 
other times this opposing power has assumed a personal 
form and name. In the Bible account of the Fall of man 
it is the serpent ; in later days, after the Babylonian cap- 
tivity, when the Jewish people had become familiar with 
the theological views of the Chaldeans, it was the per- 
sonal Satan, the seducer of souls, as described by the 
unknown author of the Book of Job. In the dualism of 
Zoroaster and the Persian fire-worship, it is seen in the 
opposing forces of Ormuzd, the power of light and good- 
ness, and Ahriman, the power of evil and of darkness. 
In Grecian mythology, it was the Furies ; in Egypt, it was 
the evil principle of Typhon. 

And now, not to bring forward any other theories with 
lesser w^eight and reason, it would seem as if this sending 
away of the sin-bearing goat into the unknown desert 
wastes ; this removing of the sins of the nation, and the 
carrying of them far off into the wilderness out of the 
sight of Jehovah and of the people, — stands as a type and 
figure of man's ascribing to the Powers of darkness the 
sin and guilt which he has suffered. It was not as a bribe 
to the Devil that this sin-bearing animal was sent out from 
the camp : it was to show that now, since their sins were 



Levitical Illustration of the AtoJtement. 155 

pardoned and their sacrifices were accepted, their guilt 
was carried back by this unconscious messenger to that 
author of evil from whom they had suffered so much. 

There were two animals instead of one, simply because 
a single material object could not in its nature sym- 
bolically embrace the whole truth which was to be ex- 
pressed. It is evident that the goat sent away, could 
not stand in the same relation to Azazel as the other did 
to Jehovah. The idea to be set before the Israelites 
was the absolute annihilation, by the atoning sacrifice, of 
sin as a separation between Jehovah and his people ; the 
complete setting free of their consciences. This idea was 
in after times expressed by the well-known words of the 
Psalmist, " As far as the east is from the west, so far hath 
he removed our transgressions from us ; " and again in 
the words of the prophet Micah, "Thou wilt cast all their 
sins into the depth of the sea." And thus by this act 
of the scape-goat, the sins of the people, pardoned by the 
other sacrificed victim marked "for Jehovah," were sent 
back to the author of sin himself. This then was the 
essence of the great day of Atonement, as it stood to the 
religious consciousness of the Jewish people, — that nation 
which we believe God chose to be in a peculiar sense the 
depositary of his revealed truth and knowledge. 

We are prepared then, in the light of this Jewish cere- 
monial, to consider this great doctrine of the Christian 
faith, — the fact of our Lord's atonement for sin. In the 
creeds and articles and anthems of the Church, we find 
this fact of Christ's dying for us the central pivot upon 
which Christianity hangs. If it does not come home to 



156 Essays of To-Day. 



us in the formal statement of the definite creed technically 
worded and expressed, it is one of the heart's dearest re- 
frains as we sing in the Gloria in Excelsis, " Thou that 
takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us ! " 
or in the words of the Te Deum, " When Thou hadst over- 
come the sharpness of death, Thou didst open the kingdom 
of heaven to all believers." 

Of course, then, it would happen in the history of Chris- 
tian theology, that this central doctrine of the faith should 
very soon become formulated into some theory, and that 
this theory would represent the best and deepest thought 
of the age in which it was born. Thus it comes to pass, 
as Professor Shedd has shown in his " History of Christian 
Doctrine," that there have been steps of belief in the 
progressive statements of this doctrine. 

Among the primitive Fathers of the age immediately 
following the Apostolic period, we find that the death of 
Christ is represented as ransoming man from the power 
and slavery of the Devil. These theories are based on 
such passages as we find in the Epistle to the Hebrews, 
" That through death he maight destroy him that had the 
power of death, that is the Devil." Then later on, during 
the latter half of the fourth century, we find another theory 
coming prominently forward, the result of the clearly-cut 
and well-defined views of Athanasius, as he expressed him- 
self at the Nicene Council when the opinions of Arius were 
finally condemned. His conception of the Atonement was 
that it was an exchange, or substitution, of penalty. The 
substitute for the death of the sinner was the death of 
the Saviour. This idea of substitution runs all through 



Levitical Illustration of the Atonement, 157 

the statements of the age, and with various changes and 
modifications remained as the prevaiUng theory of the 
doctrine. Then, in the eleventh century, Anselm, at 
Canterbury in England, published his theory of satis- 
faction. This marked the bursting forth of a new spirit 
of inquiry, — the dawning of a new era, — after five hun- 
dred years of official silence upon the subject. In his 
book entitled "Cur Deus Homo," he lays down the posi- 
tion, on philosophical and metaphysical grounds, that the 
Atonement was necessary to satisfy the claims, not of 
Satan, but of God's justice. It is then from this position 
that the varied and modified views of this doctrine, at 
present prevailing among the Orthodox theologians, have 
arisen. The Reformation, while it rent the Church eccle- 
siastically, and overturned many doctrines of the day, left 
this doctrine as Anselm formulated it, to be the residuary 
deposit upon which the thoughts of after generations might 
rest. Then came Calvinism and Deism and Unitarianism, 
as a something between a mere belief in a God and the 
tightly compacted system of Orthodoxy. Calvin said the 
Atonement was limited in its beneficial effects only to 
the elect ; Grotius said, on the other hand, it was only a 
moral exhibition of great love ; while others said it was 
a relic of Mediaevalism, — only a theological myth, — and 
that, in reality, there was no such thing at all ! 

Of course, the age we live in has had its full say upon 
this subject. It is impossible, in the narrow limits of a 
single paper, to state the varying interpretations of differ- 
ent schools of thought among the Orthodox, all based upon 
this prevailing idea of satisfaction. One school declares 



158 Essays of To- Day. 



that what our Lord accomplished was a satisfaction to the 
government of God ; another that it was to his holy and 
paternal character. Thus Andover and Princeton keep 
up the cannonade. Dr. Bushnell surprised the Christian 
world by saying in his famous book, "The Vicarious Sac- 
rifice," that the Atonement was subjective in character, 
that it was Christ's life and teachings and sympathy which 
saved men, and that the world had been looking only on 
one side of the problem before this, in considering Christ's 
death as every thing. And certainly Dr. Bushnell has 
dragged out to the light one important side of this sub- 
ject, — the boundless, living, working sympathy of the ever- 
living Son of God ; hit this is net all the side. " This is 
he that came by water and by blood," says St. John : not 
by water only, — not by teaching and the purity of ethics 
alone, — but by water and blood; by sympathy and love; 
and by something more, — by an act which in some way 
was sacrificial, and which in God's sight was effective in 
breaking down, for all time, that something which had 
before kept God and man apart ! 

MacLeod Campbell, in his most helpful contribution to 
this subject of the Atonement, re-echoes the strain of truth 
that the Atonement is above every thing else a revelation 
of the Father's heart of love, and that Christ in his two- 
fold nature is the revealer of God and the interpreter of 
the human soul 

This doctrine of the Atonement through the sacrifice of 
Christ has been and may be most shockingly distorted and 
abused. Rude and unthinking yet zealous men talk about 
the blood of Jesus appeasing the wrath of the Father, and 



Levitical Illustration of the Atonement. 1 59 

glow at times with a savage rhetoric over the Cross of 
Calvary, until we feel " this cannot be God's truth ! " And 
yet we know it is the deepest and profoundest feelings of 
the soul which can be most successfully satirized and 
parodied. The abuse of any great truth should teach 
us, not to give up that truth, but only to hold it upon 
grounds which are far above abuse. 

I have read lately the statement of a certain teacher 
in Boston, who in some vague way calls himself a Chris- 
tian minister, that it was time this idea of a bloody trap- 
door into heaven, through which a highly favored few might 
pass, was abandoned. But get beneath this statement : see 
the way in which, in this suffering world, God has written 
it as a law in our nature, that it is only by sacrifice the 
best results of character can be obtained, —and then who 
can refuse this same privilege to the Almighty .'' 

If in the original creation we see this principle of sacri- 
fice; if, in the throes of the mother vicariously suffering 
for the life of her little one, and bound to that little one 
because of the deep lines of sacrifice contained in the 
very fact of its birth, we see this principle of vicarious- 
ness as the hidden granite upon which the superstructure 
of all truly noble character rests, — can we refuse God 
himself this privilege of sacrifice, which is the innermost 
attribute of love t 

Nay, rather, we should bind ourselves anew to this cen- 
tral doctrine of the Christian Church which has come down 
to us through all the ages, from the first preaching of the 
gospel, and which contains in it deeper and more profound 
truth than can ever be found in the easy, flippant flings 



6o Essays of To- Day. 



of doubt. For the very essence of the gospel, and the 
root of truth, after all, is in the so-called Patripassian 
heresy ; for if God has not suffered to save man, how are 
we saved at all ? 

What, then, does this Jewish figure of the double offer- 
ing of the animals teach us ? Let us go back to the goat 
slain, and the goat sent away into the wilderness, which 
we have left for a few moments, and see. Here, then, is 
God's own type and figure of what that Atonement is, and 
how it is carried on. The slain goat for Jehovah we see 
plainly before us. The scape-goat sent away to carry off 
man's load of sin, and cancel the guilt of the people, we 
lose sight of in the unknown depths. 

In the same way Jesus Christ dies for our sins, and saves 
us from their consequences : we see this sacrifice plainly and 
unmistakably before us. Once in time he comes to do the 
Father's will, and remove the obstacles that were in the 
way of man's return to God. But just how the Atonement 
atones ; how Christ carries our sins ; where he cancels 
them in the divine economy, and the exact method and 
meaning of God's plan of putting them away, — all this is 
a great mystery : it is like the vast wilderness into which 
the scape-goat entered. So, as we cannot handle these 
eternals in God's way, and may only get lost if we attempt 
it, it is best for us to cling to the acknowledged fact, 
the sacrifice slain, and not pursue the retreating method, 
the sacrifice sent away, into that which was a figure of the 
infinite. The goat slain stands for the manifested fact ; 
the goat sent away, for the hidden, unrevealed method of 
the Atonement. 



Levitical Illustration of the Atonement. i6i 

As the gifted Edward Irving says in one of his sermons, 
"Atonement is a mere notion, figure of speech, or simili- 
tude, until it be seen effected in the constitution of the 
person of Christ under these two wills or operations. I 
object not to the similitude taken from paying debts ; nor 
to the similitude taken from redeeming captives ; nor to 
the similitude taken from one man's dying for another ; 
nor to any of the infinite similitudes which St. Paul useth 
most eloquently for illustrating and enforcing the truth 
of the Atonement, or reconciliation : but the similitudes 
are to my mind only poor helps for expressing the large- 
ness and completeness of the thing which is done by the 
Word's being made flesh." Christ did not die for a mere 
metaphor alone, called sin ; for a sentiment, or a guess, 
or a peculiar tradition of the Jewish race. He died for a 
great purpose ; and, however beautiful and instructive his 
life and teachings were in themselves, there still remains 
that great objective fact of his dying, as the Lamb of God, 
who came to take away the sins of the world. 

Suppose some philanthropist were to visit the prisons 
of our land to alleviate the sufferings of their inmates, 
and should attempt their restoration ; suppose he ordered 
himself to be crucified before the windows of some loath- 
some prison ; and then, as he was dying, let us imagine 
him saying to the lookers-on from behind their iron bars, 
" See ! I am dying for you ! " The helpless captives in their 
pity might say, "It is very kind in you to die for us; but 
how does the fact of your death upon that cross affect the 
fact of our imprisonment within these walls } It is beau- 
tiful in you, but utterly useless ; the mere act of your dying 



1 62 Essays of To- Day. 

cannot set us free." Precisely in the same way as this, 
let us be careful how we think of Christ's sacrifice as a 
piece of human sentiment, and lose the connecting link be- 
tween his life and sacrifice, and the setting at liberty them 
which were bound. And then, on the other hand, let us 
remember that if we would hold this truth profoitndly and 
far above the changing explanations of the shifting cen- 
turies of thought, we must hold it as a mystery which our 
best explanations only partially reveal. While we rejoice 
in the goat slain for our sins in the open fore-court of the 
tabernacle, we must remember that the other victim has 
gone upon its mysterious errand of carrying back the sins 
to the unknown Azazel, in the depths of the wilderness. 
Thus, I think, we should cling to the two sides of this sub- 
ject, — the side which is revealed, and the side which is 
hidden. 

Thank God ! the Jesus Christ who saves us is not a 
theological figment, but a living person. The Christ of 
theology alone is chameleon-like in character. He is any 
thing the doctors and schoolmen choose to make him. 
He is in the sacrament of the Romanist, in the decree 
of the Calvinist, in the sentiment of the Socinian. 

But just as you are a power to your child, though he 
may not be able to define or describe you ; just as the 
violets of the mossy bank, or the opening lilies of the 
valley, are something very different to you, in your first 
walk in the balmy opening spring, from the dull explana- 
tions of them in the hand-book of botany, — so, after all, 
the personal and historical Christ, — that one whom we 
feel we have somehow known in the past history of the 



Levitical Illustration of the Atonemejtt. 163 

world, — is now, has been, and will be in the future, some- 
thing inexpressibly greater and different, than any thing 
or every thing men with their opposite systems say he is. 

Were it vouchsafed to us once, for an afternoon, to walk 
with Jesus Christ now, along these branching roads which 
stretch towards the setting sun, as the disciples walked 
with him eighteen hundred years ago over the hills and 
valleys of Judea, I think our souls would speak out in a 
way of their own, and not in the phraseology of the books. 
We would ask for further light and knowledge, and de- 
votedness and strength ; we would value our fleeting mo- 
ments, and would make ourselves strong in those places 
where we felt that we were weak. And when the time for 
our parting had come, and as from the disciples at Em- 
maus, our Lord had vanished from our sight, we would 
find that we had not been quoting from this or that text- 
book, but that the heart itself had shown unto each of us 
a more excellent way of its own. 

Thus let us ever value our creeds, and thank God for 
that side of truth which is for ever fixed and settled and 
abiding. Let us thank Him, too, for that which is left open 
and unrevealed, that we may float our spirits in that sea 
which is shoreless and eternal. Let us unite the dogma- 
tism of the positive creed with the aspiration of the heart, 
after that which is and must be for ever mysterious. 

Thus, remembering that the secret things belong unto 
the Lord our God, may we learn that greatest lesson of 
all true philosophy, that it is always the highest reason to 
know the limits of reason. 



164 Essays of To-Day. 



VIII. 

MEASURING LINES. 

^TPHERE have been distinctly prominent in the history 
of the Church and in the progress of Christian doc- 
trine two opposite tendencies, represented by the Latin and 
the Teutonic types of mind : the one plants itself on the 
institutionalism of the Christian faith, and revolves about 
that which is fixed and sacramentally deposited ; the other, 
hailing the discoveries of every new age, climbs aloft over 
every new unfolding of truth, and, busy with its specula- 
tions and its adaptations, lives chiefly in the inspiration of 
the future. 

The former class emphasize the fact of a past revelation 
and legateeship of power ; the latter exalt the fact that 
God reveals himself anew in humanity, and that while the 
old essence of truth can never be lost, the Church, like 
the householder of our Lord's parable, must bring forth 
out of its treasury things new and old, for the necessities 
and liabilities of the hour. But whether our look is back- 
ward over the wake of history to the remote beginnings of 
our faith, or forward over the unploughed wave of the 
future, the Church of Jesiis Christ is a power in the world 
to-day, both because of its past supernatural origin, and 



Measuring Lines. 165 



because of its present and abiding hold upon the hand of 
the ever-Hving God. 

The world has shown us epochs when men have said, 
Surely this must be the end of all things ! there can be no 
readjustment of truth after its present entanglement with 
error ! But Christianity has always righted itself. It has 
lived to see Rome, in its imperial, oligarchic, and ecclesias- 
tical government, built and rebuilt like a child's house of 
blocks. It has seen empires and governments wiped out 
from the face of Europe, as the restless schoolboy's pictures 
are drawn and sponged away, and drawn again, upon his 
black and busy slate. It has witnessed the conflict of old 
ideas in the New World, with fresh and unprecedented sur- 
roundings. It has seen errors, strong in themselves, spring 
up all the ranker and the stronger for the lavishness and 
richness of the new soil in which they have been planted. 

Error has reproduced itself all through the ages ; but 
there never was a great error in the world without its bal- 
ancing truth. Only, men who have seen the error have 
failed to see the out-look of the truth. Job said to his 
worrying friends, when they wanted to dig his moral grave 
for him and place the epitaph upon his tomb, " Here lies 
one who thought he held the truth," — "No doubt but ye 
are the people, and wisdom shall die with you." Elijah 
said in his hour of timidity, when the prophet quailed before 
a guilty queen, " Lord, take away my life ! I am no better 
than my fathers : I only am left." But truth has always 
lived down error ; the right, though diffused through a 
minority, has always out-lived the wrong, though that 
wrong were conspicuous for its numbers and its power. 



1 66 Essays of To-Day . 

God has made Christian truth immortal. He has given us 
a Spirit of Wisdom to abide with his witnessing Church for 
ever, of whom our Lord declares, " He dwelleth with you, 
and shall be in you." 

It becomes us then, in considering the Christian system, 
to study out the capabilities it offers us, of measuring truth. 
Placing Christianity in the world to-day, side by side with 
Positivism or the scientific Nihilism of the hour, how great 
and wide and accurate are its soundings for the three ulti- 
mate questions of all theology, — God, and the Soul, and the 
Future ! Thus in theology, as in physics and metaphysics, 
the answer to the truth rests upon that kind of measurement 
known, in technical terms, as the lines of co-ordinates. We 
come back to the old system of latitude and longitude and 
altitude, a measurement and determination of our position 
by a standard which asks these three radical questions : 
How deep, how wide, how high, are your measurements } 
Answer these, and you will find out just where you stand, 
— just how large your Jerusalem will be. Let us then go, 
as did the man in the prophet Zechariah's vision, with a 
measuring line in our hands, and let us find out the length 
and the breadth of Jerusalem ; not as it once was in the 
past, not as it may become in the future, but just as it is 
to-day. 

When we come to ask what is meant by Christian truth, 
it seems, as has been said, as if we could resolve it all into 
three great categories, — what we know of the Divine 
nature ; what we know of Human nature ; what we know 
of the Hereafter. 

God, and the soul, and the future, — what do we know 



Measuring Lines. 167 



about these ? All theological thought run through church 
systems, or philosophical systems, or through speculations 
which belong to no system at all, is meant to bring us 
face to face with these three great thoughts, these three 
sides of our being, which tell us what is the depth and the 
breadth and the height of our measurements of truth. 
And each system has its own way of getting at the truth, 
because all truth must come either by revelation, or by 
induction, or by analogy. God gives us revelation ; sci- 
ence gives us induction, or the method of obtaining laws 
from facts ; and the judging reason gives us the system of 
generalization by analogy, when we reverse the process of 
induction, trace up our facts to law, assume our laws as 
true, and then watch carefully the results which follow. 

The man who argues by analogy places his analogies 
side by side, and then tries to find out which has the most 
reason in its favor. The fact and the law are both assumed 
to be true ; and the question comes, whether, with such a 
fact and such a law, such a cause as that which is given can 
be the true one. So then we know in these ways : God 
gives us a knowledge of divine truths, and we call it revela- 
tion ; modern science gives us the technical method known 
as induction; and Christian reason gives us that ample 
field of inference, both from revelation and from science, 
which we may broadly define as deduction. Revelation is 
an authoritative fact with an authoritative cause ; science 
is a bundle of facts leading up to a set of probable laws ; de- 
duction is a bundle of results awaiting some test, stretching 
out for a cause that can be verified. Thus we can know 
the height and the breadth and the depth of any Christian 



1 68 Essays of To-Day. 



fact by one or by all of these three ways. And thus 
we can see how it is that with so many different theo- 
ries of all the world of interest, which lies within the great 
realm of God, and the soul, and the future, and with such 
varying conceptions of the nature and scope of revela- 
tion, and of scientific induction, and of the lawful deduc- 
tion from these, so many men in the progress of doctrine 
and in the evolution of Christian thought, with their dif- 
fering measuring lines in their hands, have made so many 
different measurements of the city of the great king, 
where truth lieth, and where God satisfies. Is it any 
wonder that the history of the past eighteen Christian 
centuries has been the history of every shade, and com- 
bination of shade, of opinion and of judgment ; of under- 
stood and misunderstood truth t Consider this union of 
imperishable truth with the shifting surroundings of the 
ages through which it has slowly but surely forced on its 
way. Christianity and Roman law give us Latin theology ; 
Christianity and the schoolmen give us modern metaphys- 
ics ; Christianity and the crusades give us the spirit of 
chivalry ; and Christianity and the illumination of the Re- 
naissance give us the mental search of the Reformation. 

Like Mary at the tomb, when she said, amid her tears, 
"They have taken away my Lord, and I know not where 
they have laid him," the readjusted Church of each new 
epoch has but to speak the old familiar word in its 
changed surroundings, and the recognition of the same 
one Lord and Master comes as by a flash, and the plaint 
of doubt gives way before the joyful reassurance, — the 
"Rabboni" of a certified faith. 



Meastirmg L ines. 1 69 



The development of Christian doctrine thus far has 
been a long-continued problem of geometrical progression, 
like the hard puzzle of the school-day arithmetic, about the 
company arranging themselves in untold combinations by 
a single change of position. But then the same phases 
of truth and error have stood opposite to each other after 
the vslow shifting of centuries : there have been innumer- 
able moves and changes, and yet there they are to-day, 
the same faces moving, planet-like, slowly round the same 
ellipse of objective truth ; its foci still God and man; its 
diameter still the relationship between them ; its circum- 
ference still the never-ending character of that relation- 
ship. 

We lift up our eyes to-day, and, looking back over 
the past, see a man with a measuring line going to 
measure Jerusalem, to see what is the breadth thereof, 
and what is the length thereof. 

This is the measurement of the first ten centuries. 
God, and the soul, and the future are measured by an 
appeal to the inferences from revelation as then under- 
stood, and by the traditionalism of historic precedent. 
The first great development of Christianity in the world's 
religious history was the wonderful system of the Latin 
Church. 

The Eastern Church lingered to debate the intricate 
problems of theology, and in its quiet and repose seemed 
to enjoy the mooted questions of the hour. 

The Western Church, on the other hand, culminating in 
the genius of Charlemagne and Alcuin, was almost brusk 
in its military haste to know its official duty, and to do it. 



I/O Essays of To-Day 



It had that faith in God's power and its own complying 
obedience as the certified assurance of success, which the 
Roman centurion had, when he begged our Lord to drive 
away the sickness from his household, just in the way in 
which he himself issued his orders, and knew they must be 
done. It was in this spirit that the power of Christianity 
was evolved out of the necessities of the hour. The true 
meaning of Christ's name was being written in the Latin 
rule of power, as before it had been written in the Hebrew 
and the Greek domination. [Modern ecclesiastical law and 
theology are both based upon the system of the Roman 
law-court ; for St. Augustine, in laying the foundation of the 
theology of the Latin Church, built it and framed it upon 
the central structure of the Roman judiciary, and used 
the terms of the forum and the law-court for the soul's 
conception of its relationship to God. Thus it happens 
that these terms have been handed down, inwrought into 
our Christian theology until the present day. Who can 
doubt that this solid masonry work of law, and discipline, 
and system, was needed as the strong abutments upon 
which the after-arching span of modern truth was to rest } 

The Church had received a deposit of truth in the shape 
of the Scriptures and the early interpretation of the 
primitive Fathers. This was to be guarded within the 
citadel of ecclesiasticism, lest it should be lost in the rough 
contentions and the break-up which came after the fall 
of Rome. And thus the measurement of ecclesiasticism 
was a true one, as the man of the hour weighed the great 
truths of revelation with the local weights of the hour, 
and unrolled his measuring line around that solid Jeru- 



Measuring L ines. 1 7 1 



salem that stood like a rock on the headland of civilization, 
to shatter the dashing waves. 

We look again at another figure seen in the distance, 
coming to measure Jerusalem. 

It is not a church system any longer "5 it is a Christian 
scheme of philosophy which comes to the front now. The 
scattered threads of thought, which before were mainly 
run into questions of church discipline, are now woven 
out into logical phylacteries and philosophical coverings. 
Aristotle's logic supports St. Paul's doctrine of Election ; 
Calvin gathers up the lost bits of a system as he finds 
them strewed along the centuries from the period of 
Augustine to the Reformation ; and his Pelagian and So- 
cinian opponents hunt for their treasures, — and thus the 
measurement of Jerusalem is made in terms of theological 
dogmatism. 

With these teachers the past was wrong, simply because 
it was past ; and the future would be wrong, too, if it 
differed much from the fixedness of the present. The 
epoch covered by the centuries which have passed since 
the Reformation, while it has covered divergent specula- 
tions and opposite systems of Protestant thought, is mainly 
a compelled outgrowth from an error, — a drift into super- 
stition. It has been a period in which Christian thought, 
in its protestations against an excess of over-belief, has 
been walled up in the stronghold of dogmatic truth. Why 
then, it may be asked, if it has measured the immediate 
past successfully, will it not answer for the present, and the 
future that is coming out of the present } The answer is 
found in the fact that there are unmistakable signs of a 



172 Essays of To- Day. 



day slowly but surely dawning upon us, in which it seems 
as if there was to be a new outgrowth from dogmatic Pro- 
testantism, even as Protestantism itself came out of the 
exclusive church-system drift towards the autocratic claims 
of Rome. 

See ! yonder goes still another form, veiled and silent, 
treading with noiseless step round the walls of Jerusalem. 
He, too, would measure it. He is in the world's eyes the 
coming man ; the world of unaccepted truth lies open to 
him. He does not believe in any church system ; that is 
too far away in the past for him. He does not believe in 
the mere dogmatism of a scattered, miscellaneous Ortho- 
doxy. He would adapt Christianity, or a part of it at 
least, to himself and his own favorite views ; but he would 
have no special creed at all : he wants to have a free, 
unhampered range of thought, and let his measuring line 
unwind itself to any length. 

Let us look at him. What shall we do with him.? What 
shall we say to him "^ 

That a quiet, stormless change in the history of Chris- 
tianity is at present in progress, and that a something 
distinct and clear in the history of Theology is coming out 
of it all, is plain enough, if only we look carefully into the 
subject; if only we cast our eyes out of the windows of 
the old familiar home we live in, and do not try to shut 
out the view, by gathering the heavy traditional curtains 
around us, and settling down before the comfortable fire 
upon the ancient, reminiscent hearth. 

But how has it come about } The answer is, it is simply 
the result of this third attempt of the creedless unknown 



Measuring L ines. 1 7 3 



figure, outside of the walls, to measure Jerusalem. The 
logical result of continued protesting has carried its protests 
further than the reformers ever dreamed of, and has denied 
every thing but matter. Even self-consciousness, even 
moral accountability, have been given up by these pro- 
testants against all revelation. They have measured God, 
and he has been in turns every thing and nothing. They 
have measured man, and he has been in turn a demigod, 
and only a fusion of chemical elements. They have meas- 
ured the future, and it has been Pantheistic absorption, or 
blank emptiness. 

They have denied the supernatural, and with it the 
possibiHty of revelation ; have deified science, and have 
drawn, by an easy eclecticism from all sorts of premises, 
every manner of conclusion. 

When you ask the length of Jerusalem, they answer. 
Any length ; when you ask the depth, the answer is, Any 
depth ; when you ask the breadth, the cry comes back, 
Any breadth you please! 

This school of thought, with the bright and busy knot 
of men in England who have formed it, is the school of 
speculative aeronauts ; it is ballasted with the few hastily- 
gathered stones of natural religion ; depends upon a some- 
thing lighter than the atmosphere of earth ; is lifted up by 
the volatile expansion of the commonest Christain senti- 
ments ; is connected only with any thing it happens to grap- 
ple ; throws overboard its playful anchors whenever it cares 
to ; and goes upwards, and downwards, and sideways, and 
any ways, provided it keeps moving somewhere in an upper 
world, where only the professional expert can breathe. 



174 Essays of To-Day. 



But these men are measuring, in the scientific terms of 
to-day, that old Jerusalem which they find amid the other 
facts of the world about them ; and thus it looks as if 
their measurements might prove to be the links in the 
unseen chain which are to unite the future with the 
present, — just as barbarism compacted the Church into 
ecclesiasticism, and the tottering, over-development of the 
Church idea brought on the Reformation. It is like 
Leverrier's discovery of the planet Neptune: first came 
the trembling uncertainties and vibrations ; and then, back 
of these, he beheld the ponderous impelling orb. Thus 
it always happens in the world of thought : the fluctuat- 
ing phenomena appear first ; and then, behind these, we 
see the disturbing cause. 

And thus tendencies which we deprecate may produce 
results which are in God's own chosen path, — as Pha- 
raoh's hardness brought on the exodus, and the conquests 
of Cyrus the release from captivity. And in this way 
it comes to pass, that the old ecclesiastical Catholic and 
the old theological Protestant are to-day alike, in their 
supreme desire to forget the past, save as it is an inspi- 
ration to them, and to make the present of Christianity 
strong and hopeful and positive, in resisting the new 
and insinuating opposition of the Neo-paganism of to- 
day, — that revived materialism which trails itself wit- 
tingly or unwittingly over the writings of England's 
latest, freshest minds. And this is only the fulfilment of 
Lacordaire's prophecy, when, after his visit to England, 
in 1852, by an intuitive glance into the existing state 
of affairs, he, a Dominican monk, wrote the following 



Measn ring L hies. 1 7 5 



memorable words : " I do not believe that the order of 
things established in the Middle Ages, with its methods of 
coercion, will ever be re-established in the world ; but 
little by little, as all nations enter into more rapid com- 
munication with one another, and power no longer lends 
its support to error, schism, and false religions, two centres 
of unity will spring up, — the one -positive, which will 
embrace all Christians, and the other negative, which will 
unite all sceptics ; and from the struggle between these 
two colossal powers will result the combats of the last 
days. This is the light," he concludes, " in which I 
regard the future." 

Such is this third attempt ; such are these three at- 
tempts. God, and the Soul, and the Future have been 
measured by revelation, and by the inductional methods 
of science, and by Christian and unchristian deduction. 
First, in the history of the world, there came a massive 
church system, and it reached its climax in the claims of 
Rome ; then there came a protest and a reformation, and 
it has rested in the lines of defence thrown up in the hour 
of need. Now there are tokens of another evolution of 
thought in the world, and its last resting-place the future 
alone can reveal. Dr. Lange, in his Life of Christ, in one 
chapter studies to show that the Petrine age of obedience 
in the Church was to corde first ; the Pauline period of 
faith was to come next ; and the Johannean epoch of spir- 
itual intuition and love was to come last. And in this 
light there comes a new meaning to our Lord's answer to 
Simon Peter, as that Apostle inquired the future destiny of 
St. John : " If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that 



1/6 Essays of To-Day 



to thee ? " This is that internal welling up of truth in 
the soul which comes later on in life, after the obedience 
of childhood and the mental exercise of manhood ; that 
subjective insight which comes with the serenities of old 
age, which it was the aged Apostle's delight to image forth 
as the far-off condition of the Church of the latter days, 
when he said, "The anointing which ye have received 
of him abideth in you, and ye need not that any man 
teach you ; but, as the same anointing teacheth you all 
things, and is truth and is no lie, and even as it hath 
taught you, ye shall abide in him." 

It does not become the Christian mind to fear a foreign 
enemy. The foes of Christianity are ever those of its 
own household. To-day, we can cast the fullest measure- 
ment of hopefulness about the walls of Jerusalem, and 
emphasize the power there is in it, when once we realize 
the breadth thereof and the depth thereof. Thus far 
in the world's history, Christianity has appeared in many 
forms, but chiefly it has assumed the form of an organized 
system, and of a theological scheme, and of an ijitintional 
sentiment. There are certain minds which see the fullest 
meaning of the Christian religion in its institutionalism ; 
there are others who see its truest power in its logical 
exactness ; and there are still others who find their best 
inspiration in its underlying fitness for man's needs and 
longings after the divine and the eternal. 

The truth then forced home upon us, as we have seen 
the past history of the Church and its present needs and 
its future outlook, is simply this : The genius of Chris- 
tianity, by its historic precedents and its composite struct- 



Measuring L ines. 1 7 7 



lire, implies comprehension rather than uniformity as its 
true ideal of power. Not that we should strive to be 
different the one from the other, or should ride the bony 
hobby of obstinate individualism ; but that we should be 
on the lookout for great Christian results in the best way 
that we can secure them, rather than live and move and 
have our being in the boasted methods of any one man, 
or any set of men. It does not become us to-day to be for 
ever singing the Lord's song in the provincial dialect of 
our own school or party. That is to-day the truest form 
of Christianity which, within the lawful lines of revealed 
religion, gives God the greatest glory, and brings the largest 
and most healthful influence to bear upon the will, and 
leads men away from themselves most completely to the 
obedience of Jesus Christ. 



12 



178 Essays of To- Day. 



IX. 



THE PRESENT-DAY ELEMENTS IN CHRIS- 
TIANITY. 

'T^HE systematic study of Church history enables us to 
be famiUar with the past forces of Christianity ; and 
we know the Church heroes of by-gone days, as they are 
scattered through the ages, better, perhaps, than we can 
know the influence of men and the tendency of move- 
ments to-day. It is a hard thing to get a bird's-eye view of 
the days we live in, or to see the whence and the whither 
of streams of thought, whose land-locked current is be- 
fore us. The development of Christian thought to-day 
is like the map of Europe : the natural features of the 
continent remain the same, but the political outHne is 
continually changing ; empires grow out of kingdoms, and 
kingdoms grow out of duchies ; weaker nationalities are 
divided between stronger ones, and the grim law of the 
survival of the fittest is everywhere supreme. 

The common outlines of Christianity remain to-day un- 
changed among much that is changing, like the moun- 
tains and plains which man cannot modify ; but the methods 
of expression and the forms of thought shift themselves to 
suit the prevailing temper of the times. Creeds grow out 
of whims, compulsions, drifts, and different phases of bias ; 
old systems of thought are absorbed in newer and more 



Present-day Elements in Christianity. 1 79 

vigorous ones ; obstinate dogmas and confessions suffer 
a fate similar to that of Poland and Hungary in the history 
of Europe, and are absorbed in the strife of greater powers, 
— while germs of thought, quietly let alone, appear in the 
day of battle as full-grown forces, which have their place 
in keeping the balance of power, and must needs be con- 
sulted in the crisis-moment of action. 

This power of development, this flux and change in the 
history of Christianity, is found in the radical fact that it is 
planted, after all, in human lives, and not alone in a written 
parchment or a man-managed system. The prophets of 
the old Jewish Church are mere lay-figures, and their 
prophecies are dead-letter writings, until we get at the 
living conception of revelation as God in history, speaking 
to men and calling them to do His work. And from that 
day to the present, the line of Christian advance has been 
ever away from its remote beginning in the hazy East, 
towards some unseen climacteric point in the West. The 
power of its progress consists in this continual insertion 
of itself in the core of human-nature's experiences, and 
then throwing out these internal experiences to the world 
in the shape of objective truths. Through the lives 
and experiences of unnumbered men the old truth, like 
the sun in the heavens, ascends higher and higher ; and 
though forms and systems rise and fall, the hitherto un- 
called world is being called, as the light creeps over the 
disc of shadow. Like the flight of the eagle. Christian 
truth moves round and round the pivotal foundations of 
all things ; but it moves in a spiral, not in a circle ; and 

" Though a wide compass round be fetched," 



i8o Essays of To-Day. 



still it narrows in and in, while at the same time it sweeps 
round the broadest. It has been the inward experience of 
the individual which has helped to form the outward dog- 
mas ; it is the growth of the inward sense of God's pres- 
ence in the individual life, which has fashioned the true 
outer bulk of formal doctrine. 

Athanasius, brow-beaten and perplexed by all sorts of 
Arian arguments, still clung to his statement of the one- 
ness of Christ with the Father, as the root and origin of 
any profound doctrine of the Incarnation. His life was 
nothing to him apart from this conviction within him ; and 
we forget Athanasius the builder, while we hurry over the 
planks of his conviction in the bridge-like creed. 

Augustine felt the burden of his sins in a way w-hich 
none of his easy-going Pelagian friends could understand. 
They would have a freer statement of the doctrine of hu- 
man guilt, — one that would not make them feel badly in 
the midst of their plans for this life. But the man whom 
God had called, — knowing what sin was, and what the 
saving grace of God was, — wrote himself, as with great 
drops of blood, deep into the theology of his age ; and the 
emphasis which he gave to the doctrine of sin is felt and 
heard to-day. 

And, in the same way, Savonarola in Florence drew the 
dividing line between Pagan art and Christian truth ; and 
Luther and Wesley, and Maurice and Kingsley have each 
in their day struggled with the evils of their hour, and 
have been openly crowned, along with all those 

" Dead but sceptred sovereigns of the past, 
Whose spirits rule us from their urns." 



Preseiii-day Elements in CJiristianity. i8i 

By the Church of Christ, we mean God's call to men. 
From the far-off plains of Chaldea, God called Abraham 
from the midst of Paganism, and made him the head of 
that long line of faithful ones who " believed God!' From 
Abraham came the Jewish Church, wonderful in its his- 
tory, and yet only a provisional institution, — a dyke in the 
desert, to wall off the overflowing flood of polytheism from 
wiping out utterly the revelation of monotheism. And 
then came the last epoch. " Your Father Abraham," said 
our Lord, "rejoiced to see my day ; and he saw it and was 
glad." From provincial Paganism to rational Judaism ; 
from restricted Judaism to Catholic Christianity, — this 
has been the march of truth, from the far-off Ur of the 
Chaldees to the Pacific slope of the New World ! And 
this path of Christian progress has not been made by ob- 
stinate and vehement denials of old errors or present-day 
prejudices ; it has been by a larger, fuller comprehension 
of dogmatic truth and the inner principles of Christian 
revelation. The Church of God can alone grow truly, not 
by protesting here and denying there, but by sweeping 
over all man-made limits with a wave of positive assertion, 
whose impulse has come from an unfathomable ocean, 
where the deep of God ever calleth unto a corresponding 
deep in the soul of man. 

There have been thus far, in the progress of theistic 
thought, four general conceptions of that institution known 
as the Church. First of all is the Pagan conception. Ac- 
cording to this, man is a being surrounded by supernatural 
and mysterious forces. He has certain dim intuitions, 
which correspond to these outward, unknown and unknow- 



1 82 Essays of To- Day. 



able forces. Therefore, he must appease these external 
powers, and in some way satisfy his religious instincts. 
This is unmixed Paganism ; the worship of the supernat- 
ural, and the paying of the conventional religious toll, ac- 
cording to the tariff-rates of human-nature's Zollverein. 
The driving impulse of this system is seen in Cain's offer- 
ing of the fruits of the ground, in Jephtha's vow, in Aga- 
memnon's sacrifice of Clytemnestra before the Grecian 
fleet sailed for Troy, in the altar to the unknown Term 
called God, which St. Paul found at Athens, and plainly 
and unmistakably in the latest religion of to-day, — the re- 
ligion of humanity, founded by Comte. Whatever makes 
the invisible world indefinite, and the definite needs of the 
soul only a blind, mysterious guess, is Paganism, — whether 
it be found at the Acropolis of Athens, or in Biological 
clubs in London, or in Brook-farm retreats in New Eng- 
land. Fascinating, attractive, winning it may be ; but, con- 
sidered as a Church, a calling out, an election of any souls 
to any higher definite hope, — its outer rim is as wide and 
yet as narrow as any thing merely natural and creaturely 
can be. 

Then comes the Jewish conception of a Church. This 
is pre-eminently the sect idea. Given two or three narrow 
points, around which mechanical men and party leaders can 
shout their shibboleth and war-cries, and you have the 
Jewish Church as our Lord found it, — filled with com- 
placent Pharisees and obstructive Sadducees, raging over 
the dead and literal letter of the traditional Church, from 
which the spirit had long ago departed. Not that this was 
all Judaism could be. Once it was great, when great men 



Present-day Elements in Christianity. 183 

lived up to its spirit ; when Abraham and Moses, and Eh- 
jah and Jeremiah were its representatives. Once it was 
great, when it came out of the hands of the Uving God, 
and was given as a sacred monopoly of truth to a chosen 
people. But that one salient idea of the Jewish Church — 
the divine monopoly of truth — degenerated in time; so that 
Judaism, like some old baronial castle on the Rhine, while 
it kept its inmates safely guarded from without, shut out 
the entire outside world from the share of that which was 
within. No doubt, God's design of exclusion was a Provi- 
dential one; no doubt He meant that certain revealed 
truths should be stamped in upon the religious conscious- 
ness of the Jewish nation ; that to Israel was to be given 
the monopoly of revealed truth, the oracles of God, — but 
the further fact that the structural Jewish Church emerged 
into the Christian Church, shows us that the Church cath- 
olic, not the Church sectarian, is the higher, grander, fuller 
type of Church, 

The Christian conception of the Church, of course, is 
one with which we are all familiar. Plainly stated, I sup- 
pose we may say that it is the exercise of revealed Chris- 
tian virtues within a sphere where knowledge is given by 
revelation, and practical duties are the necessary results of 
this knowledge ; where faith in a person becomes trans- 
lated into devotion to a cause. Christianity is continually 
receiving new definitions. Every new movement within 
it, every fresh departure from the rigidity of any state of 
traditional fixedness, — a condition which is too often taken 
for Christianity itself, — brings to light new statements and 
shades of meaning as to the exact nature of the creed of 



184 Essays of To- Day. 



Christendom. It is enough for us then, I think, to seize 
upon the one distinguishing feature of it, and to declare 
it to be the revelation of the Son of God from heaven, — 
the highest revelation possible to man, demanding, on our 
part, faith in Him, and obedience to His plainly-published 
will. 

There is one other conception of a Church. It is the 
outgrowth of Christianity, just as Christianity is the out- 
growth of Judaism, and Judaism is the election from Pa- 
ganism. It is a system that is strong and human in this : 
that, while it rests upon a Christian basis, it appeals un- 
mistakably to Pagan instincts. I refer to that marvel of 
ecclesiasticism, — the power of the Church of Rome. The 
essential strength of this system is found in the fact that 
the most devout Christian hearts and the most ambitious 
worldlings, the careless, unthinking masses who are glad 
to have their thinking done for them, and those bur- 
dened doubters who give up at last the perplexing privi- 
lege of private judgment for the satisfying authority of the 
Church's standards, — alike find in its curious admixture 
the heterogeneous elements which they severally desire. 
All are at home within its pale. Thus a Thomas Aquinas 
and a St. Francis, together with a Leo X. and a Lorenzo de 
Medici ; Mazzini the statesman, Fenelon the mystic, La- 
cordaire the preacher, Newman the doubter. Manning the 
manager, — are found in it ; together with the Irish emi- 
grant and South American filibuster. In other words, the 
Christian basis of the creed for the saint ; the traditional 
authority of the Church for the doubter ; the satisfying of 
ambition for the worldling ; and the gratification of our 



Pi'eseiit-day Elements in Chylstlanity. 



common religious instincts for the average superstitious 
peasant, — combine to give this system of Rome its far- 
reaching power and influence. 

We find, then^ to-day, in Christianity these four concep- 
tions of truth, — the Pagan ; the Jewish ; the simple Chris- 
tian ; and the mixed Roman. These elements scatter and 
combine, like the consolidating crystals of a kaleidoscope. 
But we find in every phase of Christian thought and life 
the five following elements common to them all: — 

1. The intuitions of the heart, and our common religious 
instincts. 

2. A body of doctrine, shaping itself into some written 
creed. 

3. A living person, Christ, and a future state, immor- 
tality, as factors for the soul's further development. 

4. A philosophy for the human mind, which is the neces- 
sary outcome of the fundamental propositions upon which 
Christianity is based. 

5. Internal principles of development in Christianity, 
rather than uniformity of interpretation. These make it 
adaptable to our human conditions, — such as climate, race, 
age, and surroundings, — in a way which parchment relig- 
ions like Islamism, Confucianism, and Brahminism are 
powerless to do. 

What, then, do we find, as the result of these working- 
forces in Christianity } It was this question which caused 
Jonathan Swift, in his day, to write his answer, " The Tale 
of a Tub," — wherein Peter, Martin, and Jack debate about 
the needed additions to the inherited traditional coat. But 
every age must ask its own questions, and must accept 



1 86 Essays of To-Day . 



the answer when it appears. Sometimes the answer comes 
slowly. Sometimes there is a long-impending delay, — like 
the crisis of the French Revolution, or the settlement of 
the Eastern Question ; and, having asked the question, 
'' What of the night ? " it may be given to our children, 
and not to us, to see the light of the morning. 

The present-day elements in Christianity may be re- 
solved, with an almost mathematical exactness, into the 
following categories : — 

1. The Ecclesiastical AntiqiLarians, — -those whose faces 
are set towards the beauties of by-gone phases of power. 

2. The Reactionists, — those who protest against things 
as they are, and yet are powerless to provide a new de- 
parture. 

3. TJie Pragviatical, — those who find a straight line 
invariably the shortest distance between any two given 
points in religion, and are intolerant of all others who 
cannot chalk this same straight line. 

4. The Inchoates, — those who begin to raise a great re- 
form, and who then, like the men at the tower of Babel, 
leave off to build a city. 

5. The Empirics, — those who believe only within the 
range of their own experience ; and who, in testing all 
phases of truth by their experimental share in it, leave the 
vast side of the non-ego unaccounted for, and are therefore 
compelled to repeat their experiments. 

6. The Accidentals, — those who build the structure of 
their creed or their church-system upon some local or un- 
important precedent in early Christianity. The Baptist 
body to-day builds its ecclesiastical system upon the 



Presejit-day Elements in Christianity. 187 

method of administering a sacrament eighteen hundred 
years ago, in an Eastern, semi-tropical cHmate. A clinical- 
eucharistic church might, with a corresponding fitness, be 
formed, based upon the accidental method of receiving 
the Passover-meal, or Lord's Supper, while reclining upon 
couches, according to the Eastern method of reclining at 
meals. 

7. TJie Enthusiasts, — those who range all the way from 
an active zeal to an untempered fanaticism, and who hab- 
itually leap before they look. 

8. The Iron-bonnd, — those whose hatches are closed 
down for the remainder of the voyage ; who have received 
a cargo, which is not to be touched till the port is 
gained. Richard Holt Hutton calls this metaphysical reg- 
istry of the Church's tonnage the Hard-chtcrch idea. 

9. The Liberal, — those who reverse the methods of the 
iron-bound, and are ready to make fast friends with every 
new turn of thought. 

10. The Traditional, — those who are in other matters 
free enough, but who, in their religious affairs, never go 
outside of party ruts and party enthusiasm. 

1 1. The Political, — those who, on the battle-of-the-Boyne 
principle, keep up two centuries of Orangeism, for the sake 
of a past political issue. 

12. The Historical, — those who would reproduce, for 
new times, modes of thought and methods of administra- 
tion which once crystalUzed around historical events, such 
as the Synod of Dort. A Dutch Reformed Church in a 
new country, or in missionary lands, carries with it the im- 
peding, congealed lump of history from which it sprang. 



Essays of To-Day . 



13. The Moods. Nature has its moods ; man has his 
moods, — and the Church has its moods- also. See, as illus- 
trations, the Filioque controversy, the case of the Non- 
jurors in England, Irvingism, Swedenborgianism, Faith- 
cures, and French miracle-grottos. 

14. The Passions. The Church has its strifes and storms 
quite as truly as it has its moods. In Scotland, it showed 
itself in the violent disruption of 1843. In France, we 
see it in the strifes of the Galilean party, and in the per- 
secutions of the Jansenists ; and, in our own land, in the 
religious bodies divided by the unecclesiastical wedge of 
Mason and Dixon's line, — such as the Presbyterian Church 
North and the same Church South. 

1 5. ThePaga7iized CJii'istians, — those who, in the Church 
of Rome, w^orship according to the natural dictates of the 
heart, but who substitute the Christian Trinity, the Virgin 
and the Saints, for the Pagan basis of polytheism. 

16. The Christianized Pagans, — those who reverse this 
order, and who, in taking the revealed facts of Christianity 
with extreme difficulty, flood their Paganized methods of 
thought with Christian impulses. The lives of certain so- 
called radicals, in the Unitarian ranks, are illustrations of 
this class. 

17. TJie born Rationalists, — the St. Thomas type of 
mind, — who find it hard to believe without the help of 
the senses. 

18. The born Mystics, — the St. John type, — who need 
not that any man should teach them ; the transcendental 
and the pantheistic representatives in philosophical Chris- 
tianity; the higher-life representatives in daily life. 



Present-day Elements in Christianity. 



19. The Ethical, — the St. James type, — who find it 
a very easy matter to give a practical definition of true 
reUgion and that wherein it consists. 

20. The Doctrinal, — the St. Paul type of Christian in- 
tellection, — built upon the logical foundation-stones of the 
syllogism. 

21. The Corporaiionists, — those who delight in the work- 
ing principles of institutionalism ; the mechanics of relig- 
ion, who take delight in the amount of brick and mortar 
required to build the house. 

22. The Neo-Platonists, — those who repeat the experi- 
ments of Ammonius Saccas and lamblichus to-day, and 
adapt Christianity to their philosophical interpretation of 
what it ought to be : instanced in the speculations of such 
writers as Matthew Arnold. 

23. The Neo- Aristotelians, — those who reduce the de- 
fence of Christianity to the by-gone a priori methods of 
the schoolmen, making the whole matter hang upon certain 
premises, which to them may seem real, but are to others 
hypothetical, and beyond the reach of demonstration. It 
is an open question whether it was ever intended that 
Christianity should be carried over the abyss of nothing- 
ness on a single plank, however ingeniously it may have 
been constructed. " Save me from my friends," is a motto 
for the Church, at times, as well as for society. 

24. The Deus-ex-Machina conception. This is Paley's 
idea, reduced to the popular conception of religion. The 
power of God is limited by the field he works in, and no 
new revelation can be made until the special dispensation 
is past. 



1 90 Essays of To- Day. 



25. TJie Deposit-of-faith idea. Men who cannot make 
out the questions of theology, deposit their faith in the re- 
ligious consciousness of the Church, as expressed by the 
Christian consensus of past ages ; or, to vary the illustra- 
tion, the scaffold must be assumed, while the work of build- 
ing any thing at all goes on.^ 

Perhaps there are other elements, which the skilled dia- 
lectician might elaborate from the common mass of the 
received and so-called Christianity. Certain of these ele- 
ments, cognate to human nature's peculiarities, will in all 
probability remain so long as the Church exists. Some of 
them will, in time, cancel each other, and thus will drop out 
of the list. As for the rest, the Church will outgrow 
them, — just as we learn, each one for himself, our moods 
and whims and methods of living and habits of thinking, 
and know, after a while, in the discipline of a true self-con- 
sciousness, which are real substances in life and which are 
only shadows. 

The elements in Christianity, then, to-day, are richer and 
more numerous than Church history has ever shown us 
before. The limits of belief are wider ; the dogmatic basis 
is narrower ; and over the page of religious thought in the 
present age the heavy shadows of anthropomorphitic theol- 
ogy are disappearing. Men look now at great results, 
rather than at theological puzzles and so-called clear 
views. Religion is less of a mirror, where man has for ages 
seen his God in the distorted image of his own face ; and, 
while the religious instincts are as strong as ever before, 
the scientific law of the survival of the fittest thought pre- 

1 See, as an example of this, Newman's Grammar of Assent. 



Present-day Elements in Christianity. 191 

vails. The necessary elements, the typical human traits, 
will remain ; the accidental elements will disappear in the 
newunfoldings of Christian thought, and in the presence of 
new experiences. In other words, theology must become 
inductional in its methods, as well as deductive in its con- 
clusions. Butler's "Analogy," as the strongest argument 
for Christianity, has proved this. And, with this recognized 
change of base, new and unforeseen results, in the history 
of Christian thought, will inevitably follow. 



92 Essays of To-Day. 



CAUSES OF HERESY. 

XT /"E call our world the planet Earth. That is, it is a 
wandei^er. But it is a very orthodox wanderer ; for 
it keeps close to its creed of two opposite laws, which 
enable it to whirl along upon the race-course of its orbit. 
Our friend, the Comet, is rather the greater wanderer of 
the two, and he is more properly the normal type of the 
heretic : only the initiated know when and where to expect 
him. His creed is the most radical of all free religions. 
He moves up and down through space, crossing planets, 
stars, and constellations which have been fixed from all 
eternity. The Comet is always interesting ; he has looked 
upon all sorts of worlds we have never dreamed of, and 
all sorts of worlds have looked upon him ; he has shined 
upon others, and others have given him back their shining 
in return ; he has cut his way through all varieties of con- 
stellations and all combinations of laws, free and indepen- 
dent as the north wind, but yet weaving his orbit as the 
spider spins her thread, and reappearing on his line again, 
after the flight of centuries. 

And so, too, the great world of mental and moral thought 
is a planetary body, — a wandering world. It has its laws 
and its orbit ; and philosophers, like Buckle, take the tele- 



Catises of Heixsy. 193 



scopic glass of prophecy and tell just when and where cer- 
tain views will reappear and cross the hne of other views. 
There is a world of thought which is fixed and settled ; 
there is a world of thought which, in character, is wander- 
ing and irregular. If, then, we lift this subject into the 
sphere of religious thought, we shall have, as the two op- 
posite categories, the creed of the planet and the creed of 
the comet. Leaving out of our investigations the world 
of Orthodoxy, — for every man who truly believes is ortho- 
dox in his own eyes, — I come to the subject of the present 
paper, " Causes of Heresy." 

Truly has Tertullian said, " The first thing which it is 
necessary for us to believe, is that we believe nothing 
lightly." The gay, flippant heretic, who skims over great 
truths and depths of thought — a mere connoisseur, who, 
in the easy elegance of his amateur habits of thought, finds 
a little good and a little bad in every form of faith, and 
stands in his intellectual indifference above them all — 
has no place in this paper. Nor can I include within 
the range of heretics, who charm us with the sincerity 
and outlawry of their faith, men who have no faith, and 
must have every thing embraced within the all-concluding 
grasp of their scientific classifications. The man whose 
brain is one vast collection of pigeon-holes, where every 
fact has its receptacle, and where that which cannot be 
accounted for and understood has no place, is no heretic, 
no wanderer ; he has nothing to wander from. There is 
no borderland, no twilight hours of mixed fact and faith 
with him. He lives always on the stroke of twelve, in 
the full-orbed face of time, until the striking and the run- 

13 



194 Essays of To-Day. 

ning weight are stopped by an unseen hand he has never 
been able to classify or explain. It is of such as these that 
the poet Wordsworth has written, — 

" I'd rather be 
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn, 

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn, 

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, 
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn." 

Doubt is twofold in character. It is the Janus doorway 
of knowledge, and looks backward to despair and forward 
to hope and further knowledge. Peter doubted, and yet 
became the rock of the early church ; Judas doubted, and 
his doubts wove that cord by which he went in his despair 
and hanged himself. St. Paul hints, in one place, of the 
possibility of such a thing as an " evil heart of unbelief ; " 
that is, of the crossing of the moral and the mental planes 
at such an angle, that we may believe a thing or disbelieve, 
simply because we wisJi to do so. Here the condition of 
the moral will inevitably tinge the mental state. Thus a 
belief or an unbelief may rest, after all, upon the condition 
of the will. 

Leaving, then, this phase of our subject, upon this its 
metaphysical side, let us throw overboard from the interest- 
ing class of heretics those whose heresies spring from their 
moral state, and are the result of certain conditions of the 
will. Thus our Gideon's band of doubters becomes purged 
of all who are insincere and lukewarm. We have cast out, 
into the rough outside sea of general badness, the amateur 
heretic, the man who has no faith or creed at all, and the 
man who believes in error because he wants to believe in it. 



Causes of Hej'esy. 195 



Let us trust that our cargo of thought will be lightened 
by their riddance, and that we shall sail on smoothly to- 
gether, now that these disturbing Jonahs are safely de- 
posited in the belly of that avenging whale which always 
follows in the wake of the world's wanderers, who, know- 
ing they ought to sail eastward to Nineveh, yet deliberately 
sail westward to Tarshish. Lord Byron speaks in one place 
of the delight with which, in the crowded art galleries of 
Italy, he turned 

"... from grizzly monks and martyrs hairy 
To the cahn pictures of the Virgin Mary." 

Perhaps we may experience a somewhat similar relief, 
if we, too, turn from the grizzly annals and wearying sta- 
tistics of this vast subject to the sweeter pictures of in- 
dividual character. Remembering that we have omitted 
from our catalogue of heretics all the unworthy and in- 
sincere, those who can be classed with the flippant and 
the unbelieving and the evil hearted, let us look — 

1. At the heresy of temperament, — or what we may be 
naturally. 

2. At the heresy of oitr surroundings, — or what others 
may have made us ; and 

3. At the heresy of experience, — or what we may have 
finally made ourselves. 

These categories may possibly overlap each other, and 
in some cases meet in almost equal proportions ; but still 
they are sufficiently separate and distinct to serve for our 
present purpose. When we come to give a definition of 
heresy and the heretic, we will find it a more difficult thing 
in these days of critical free thought and untrammelled 



196 Essays of To-Day. 



right of private judgment than it was a century ago. A 
writer of to-day complains that the old definition of God 
has gone, and no new one has taken its place. Perhaps 
this is true of the heresy-idea. Schism, excommunication, 
the uncovenanted mercies, — these are to many minds only 
the garments of the past, interesting relics of religion. 
They stand like heraldic armor and cross-bow and helmet, 
belonging to an age of chivalry which, while interesting 
and curious, is now effete. And yet every man draws the 
line somewhere, between that which he considers truth 
and that which he calls superstition and error. As Car- 
lyle has written : — 

'• It is well said, in every sense, that a man's religion is the chief 
fact with regard to him. By religion, I do not mean here the 
church-creed which he professes, the articles of faith which he 
will sign, and in words or otherwise assert : not this wholly, in 
many cases not this at all. "We see men of all kinds of professed 
creeds attain to almost all degrees of worth and worthlessness, 
under each or any of them. This is not what I call religion, — 
this profession and assertion which is often only a profession and 
assertion from the out-works of the man, from the mere argumen- 
tative region of him. But the thing a man does practically bekeve 
(and this is often enough ^^dthout asserting it even to himself, much 
less to others) : the thing a man does practically lay to heart, and 
know for certain concerning his vital relations to this mysterious 
universe, and his duty and destiny here, — that is, in all cases, the 
primary thing for him, and creatively determines all the rest. That 
is his religion, — or it may be his mere scepticism and no religion ; 
the manner, it is, in which he feels himself to be spiritually related, 
to the unseen world, or no world. Of a man or of a nation we 
inquire, therefore, first of all, what religion they had. Was it crea- 
tionism, — plurality of gods and physical force ? Was it Cliristian- 



Causes of Heresy. 197 



ism, — faith in an Invisible, not as real only, but as the only reality ; 
time, through every meanest moment of it, resting upon eternity ; 
Pagan empire of force displaced by a nobler supremacy, that of 
holiness? Was it scepticism, uncertainty, and inquiry whether 
there was an unseen world, any mystery of Hfe except a mad 
one, — doubt as to all this, or, perhaps, unbelief and flat denial ? 
Answering erf this question is giving us the soul of the history 
of the man and of the nation. The thoughts they had were the pa- 
rents of the actions they did ; their feelings were parents of their 
thoughts. It was the unseen and spiritual in them that determined 
the outward and actual : their religion, as I say, was the great fact 
about them." ^ 

I. Let us define heresy, for the purposes of this paper, as 
the protest of the minority against the creed of the majority ; 
and the heretics by temperament, by surroundings, and by 
experience, will be those men who have reacted from the 
ecclesiastical standard of the hour, and who, in drawing 
the lines differently, have formed a new standard of their 
own. I have said, first, there are those heretics who may 
be embraced in the great category of temperament. We 
are all familiar with those traits and characteristics which 
are the entail of Nature ; those which we have derived by 
birth, as well as that which we have made ourselves by out 
own self-determining wills. St. Paul perceived in his own 
character two wills, two selves, struggling together through 
his entire life. Many a thinker, many a worker, has felt 
this sluggish personality of inheritance, and that other per- 
sonality of conscious will-power. Dr. Arnold, of Rugby, 
longed as much as any one for definite ultimate truth ; yet 
he once said to a friend that, settle matters as he would 

1 Carlyle's " Hero Worship," — The Hero as Divinity. 



198 Essays of To-Day. 



at night, there were times when, with the dawning light 
of the morrow, every thing seemed to be an open question 
again. Such men's doubtings have a great fascination for 
us. In fact, the careful student of ecclesiastical history 
unconsciously finds himself interested in the side of the 
heretic, because of the charm of the life or the thought. 
The Apostle, in his epistle to the church of Galatia, has 
his finger upon this same fascinating tendency, when he 
exclaims : " O foolish Galatians ! who hath bewitched 
you .? " That is, there was a dazzling spiriting away of the 
calmer judgment upon the creed, by the shining of some 
attractive life on the opposite side. Men resting behind 
the bulwarks of the creed forget the power of the life ; 
the doubter, on the other hand, denying the creed, speaks 
only by the charm of his own individuality. Nestorius, 
Bishop of Constantinople in the year 428, has given his 
name to the heresy known in history as Nestorianism, 
which serves as an instance of this heresy of temperament. 
He declared that it was wrong to call the Virgin Mary the 
Mother of God : she was only the Mother of Christ, or of 
man. He was summoned before a council at Ephesus, by 
the Emperor Theodosius, and was accused by his bitter 
adversary, Cyril of Alexandria, of greatly dishonoring Christ. 
Cyril brought with him a wild, surging escort of fanatical 
monks, — very much in the way that unprincipled political 
leaders in our own time bring repeaters to colonize a certain 
ward or county, — -and judgment was passed against Nes- 
torius. The rough temperament of Cyril was disturbed at 
nothing ; the delicate Nestorius, troubled at the unthinking 
exclamations of the masses, wanted at heart, after all, to give 



Causes of Heresy. 199 



Christ a greater honor than that he should be born, a divin- 
ity, by a human woman ; yet he has been handed down to 
posterity as a heretic. By temperament he reacted from the 
unthinking masses about him. Lord Herbert of Cherbury, 
the purest of the Enghsh Deists of the eighteenth century, 
stands as another temperamental reactionist. Shocked at 
a church submerged with state patronage, the truculent 
lackey to the crown, he flew to Deism ; yet, believing in 
miracles, asked for a sign from heaven. This he says was 
granted him in the form of a miraculous flashing of fire, 
before he published his book, " Concerning Truth." His 
own description of this is as follows : — 

" Hesitating whether to publish the work or not, being in my 
chamber one fair day in the summer, — my casement being open 
toward the South, the sun shining clear and no wind stirring, — I 
took my book, ' De Veritate,' in my hands, and, kneeling on my 
knees, devoutly said these words : ' O Thou Eternal God, author 
of this light which now shines on me, and giver of all inward 
illuminations, I do beseech Thee, of Thine Infinite goodness, to 
pardon a greater request than a sinner ought to make ! I am not 
satisfied enough whether I shall publish this book : if it be for Thy 
glory, I beseech Thee give some sign from heaven : if not, I shall 
suppress it.' I had no sooner spoken these words, but a loud 
though gentle noise came forth from the heavens (for it was like 
nothing upon earth), which did so cheer and comfort me that I 
took my petition as granted, and that I had the sign demanded : 
whereupon, also, I resolved to print my book. This, how strange 
soever it may seem, I do protest before the Eternal God is true ; 
neither am I any way superstitiously deceived therein, since I 
did not only clearly hear the noise, but, in the serenest sky that 
ever I saw, being without all cloud, did to my thinking see the 
place whence it came." 



200 Essays of To-Day. 



These are specimen cases of temperamental reaction. 
The faculty of spiritual apprehension, changing and becom- 
ing tinged with some new experience, changes and colors 
the mind, and the judgment, and the structure of the creed. 
Thus the bias or coloring of that which is a temperamental 
change, works out into the written standard of faith. His- 
tory is filled with examples of this class of reactionists, 
who, by temperament going beyond a certain line, are 
called heretics. Thus the great question, after all, for 
every woiild-be theologian is, " Where do I draw my 
line ? " 

2. The second category I have called the heresy of our 
surroundings, or that which others may have made us by 
their influence. It is said of Cyrus the Great, that he 
attempted to determine the natural language of man by 
shutting certain infants away from the sound of the human 
voice, until, in childhood, they should develop a language 
of their own. A theological Infant Asylum, composed of 
a hundred young children, — Jews, Turks, babies from 
India, China, Africa, England, New England, New Zealand, 
Russia, Tartary, — all let alone to develop an unbiassed and 
purely natural theology, would be an equally interesting 
experiment. Here, at least, there would be no place for the 
heresy of any one's surroundings. Temperament, and the 
development of experience, alone would have weight or influ- 
ence here. It is never fair to judge of any side solely 
by the defenders of that side; it is not right to decide 
about a cause only by looking at the surroundings of a 
cause. Truth and error have many sides. Man is many- 
sided, and receives truth and error in twisted, complicated 



Causes of Heresy, 201 



ways. John the Baptist brought all Jerusalem out into 
the deserts to hear him ; on the day of Pentecost three 
thousand souls were converted by St. Peter's preaching. 
Success like this never followed the preaching of Christ ; 
yet Christianity rests upon Christ as the corner-stone, — 
not upon John the Baptist ; not upon the Apostle Peter. 
Whitfield and the Wesleys brought power down from 
heaven to poor creatures steeped in sin, — men who never 
dreamed of any divine enthusiasm hidden in their human 
breasts ; they went like angels of light to thousands sitting 
in darkness ; they revolutionized the English Church, and 
gave to practical Christianity a new lease upon time : yet 
if we ask who at this period fastened Christianity to the 
rock of philosophic truth ; who nailed it firm and strong 
among all merely human systems, from Plato down to Hegel, 
— the answer is, not Whitfield, not the Wesleys, not men 
of their mould ; but a dull, talking man, who fumbled with 
his fingers, and mumbled with his words, — Coleridge. So, 
too, we must judge of Christianity in Germany, not alone 
from the stand-point of Luther struggling with the Pope, or 
the later mystics, crying out against the cold sacramenta- 
rianism of the Lutheran Church ; but from the outlook of 
Schleiermacher, who first successfully passed over the 
bridge from Rationalism to Christianity, — a high and 
massive arch, which his own genius reared. And this is 
equally true in looking at infidelity. Tom Paine and 
Voltaire were infidels. Yet we must not judge of all 
infidelity by the hangers-on to these men, their aban- 
doned camp-followers. In that political and religious 
reaction which followed the period of Cromwell, there 



202 Essays of To- Day. 



appeared in England a school of materialistic and sensual 
Deism, extending from Hobbes, through Jonathan Swift, 
Chubb, and Bolingbroke, to the old Greek Pyrrhonism 
or universal doubt of David Hume. Great was the cry 
against it ; bitter was the controversy. 

But there were social and speculative reasons, liter- 
ary and temperamental and reactionary causes, which in- 
duced many men to go over from a dead church, and dull 
defenders of an old faith, to any side which seemed to have 
life and energy about it. Thus Shelley and Byron were 
snatched from a world of faith, and illogically, because the 
true poet always feeds upon faith, pursued their high call- 
ing. They are both types of this second class of heretics, 
— those who naturally gravitate toward heresy more by 
their surroundings than by temperament or by condition. 
These men made a faith for themselves, and crowned it 
with the old gods of Greece, because such spirits could 
not feed upon the vapors in the dungeon of a blank de- 
spair. Ignorance, pride, and prejudice upon any one side 
of life are sure to spawn their offspring upon the other. 
This is why religious wars are the wickedest of all conflicts. 
The Salem witchcraft and the Spanish inquisition teach us 
this universal fact. Kingsley, too, in his story of Hypatia, 
shows us this same truth, when the Monk Philammon was 
orthodox in the company of his monastery, but fearfully lax 
when out in the wicked world. 

If, then, we all live, influenced by our surroundings more 
than we know, and, in breathing the mental and moral 
atmosphere around us, give it back again as unconsciously 
our own, — has not this heresy of a man's surroundings an 



Causes of Heresy. 203 



important place in the history and philosophy of heresy ? 
Is it not a category in itself ? 

3. And then, lastly, there is that other class of heretics, — 
those who have adopted heresy as a matter of conviction, 
as the result of their experience. We all desire, above 
every thing else, to arrive at that point where we have 
some fixed and settled rule of decision. There are two 
ways of taking hold of a mystery : we leave a matter 
unsolved, or we give it a wrong solution. I may believe 
a fact, and yet reject a certain theory of that fact. I may 
believe in some mountain-like doctrine, and yet may 
find my way over its summit by some path of my own. 
It is like ascending the Rigi : I can walk up, or ride up, 
or be driven up, or steam up. But where there is no choice 
of ways, or where I think the path unsafe, I must go as the 
others go, or I must stand off at a distance and merely 
look at the summit. I believe, because I see it afar off ; 
not because I stand with the mystery under my feet. There 
are some things we can leave unsettled in matters of faith ; 
there are others which are essential, and must be solved 
in some way of our own. As I said in opening, the first 
principle of all earnest belief is, that we believe nothing 
lightly. Thus we may leave a doctrine unsolved ; we may 
reject a doctrine because we deny a theory, or we may be- 
lieve a doctrine, and yet reject a certain theory of it. By 
the heretics of experience, then, I refer to those who 
have fallen into the habit of rejecting the doctrine be- 
cause they deny the theojy. They do not believe in the 
mountaiji, because they cannot stand upon the top of the 
mountain. 



204 Essays of To-Day, 

Thus formulated, heresy, settled and defined, becomes 
its own standard of Orthodoxy ; and men who make the 
broadest generalization from their position, where a bird's- 
eye view of humanity can be obtained, grow angry and 
impatient, because all others are not as broad as they 
themselves. Thus it is, that established heresy becomes 
dogmatic. It is the Episcopacy of Charles going down 
before the Independency of Cromwell. The orthodox be- 
comes the outlaw, and the former heretics seize the reins 
of power. Did the limits of this paper allow, I should like 
to show more at length the exact position of this school of 
heresy. In Stanley's " History of the Eastern Church," 
we find an illustration of this thought, in the description 
of Athanasius and Arius, as they faced each other at the 
Council of Nice, upon the abstract subject of the Trinity, — 
the one representing the best type of generous yet dogmatic 
orthodoxy ; the other representing the best type of manly 
and dogmatic heterodoxy. 

They stood at the council, foemen worthy of each other's 
dialectic skill, in a controversy and in an age when earth 
and sea and sky were ransacked for illustrations, which, 
for definiteness, were to be clearer than the very terms to 
be defined. By heresy, then, I have referred to the reac- 
tion of the minority against the creed of the majority, 
the denial of that creed, and the substitution of a new one. 
It is, in short, a theological nebular hypothesis ; the old 
creed, whirling on its logical axis, throws off incandescent 
worlds of thought, which finally, it may be, become fixed. 
Unless the heretic becomes fixed in his faith, as I said 
before, he is a comet rather than a planet. I have been 



Causes of Heresy. 205 



speaking only of honest heretics : these we respect ; others 
only cumber the ground of thought. 

After all our moralizing, we can only conclude with 
Robert Browning, as he soliloquizes over the dead body 
in the Morgue at Paris, that picture of life's apparent 
failure : — 

" It 's wiser being good than bad ; 
It 's safer being meek than fierce ; 
It 's fitter being sane than mad : 
My own hope is, a sun will pierce 
The thickest cloud earth ever stretched ; 
That after last returns the first, 
Though a wide compass round be fetched ; 
That what begins best can't end worst, 
Nor what God blessed once — prove accurs'd." 



2o6 Essays of To-Day . 



XI. 

THE NARROWNESS OF BREADTH. 

" f~^ OD giveth it a body as it hath pleased him," said 
^^^ the Apostle Paul to the Corinthians, " and to every 
seed its own body." Here is a rational principle ; and the 
manifested result we see working around us, in the social, 
political, and religious forces of to-day. Around every 
growing and expanding seed, we behold the resultant body ; 
from every growing and therefore necessarily dying body, 
we behold the germ of a higher state, developed through 
decay and death. And yet the body in some way pleases 
Him who made it ; for to each prolific and evolving seed 
there comes a new phenomenal development ; to every 
seed its own body, — deaths and resurrections tumbling 
over each other, in this endless wheel of Nature. 

"See dying vegetables life sustain, 
See life dissolving vegetate again : 
All forms that perish, other forms supply." 

Thus Pope rhymes it ; and while philosophers, both 
staid and transcendental, finger the harp-strings of its 
meaning, — running to the high tones of optimism, or the 
lowest ones of despair, — the principle is no less true 
for this variedness of interpretation, even if the truth does 
become at times a platitude. 



TJie Narroivness of Breadth. 207 

Take, however, an illustration from the politico-econom- 
ical world, before we pass on to the direct subject of our 
theme. 

In the nation, to-day, men are musing in their hearts, 
whether or no we have reached the highest water-line of 
national greatness and prosperity. Perhaps not yet has the 
tide of what is ultimately possible reached the dry sand of 
the beach, and scored itself there. But as our civilization 
has been forced on with a hot-house pressure, the seeds of 
our decay are to be found in that very flowering of civiliza- 
tion which is now our national boast. First comes cold 
New England's grim welcome to the Puritan colony ; then 
economy and thrift, and a religious life, the expression of 
this homespun condition of body and mind; then a spirit- 
ual oligarchy with its theocratic claims ; then a colonial 
rebellion, followed by a theological one ; then breadth and 
culture ; then luxury and lack of conviction ; then mate- 
rialism and Epicureanism ; then sensuous conceptions of 
life ; then physical decay, and the decline of the nation's 
manhood : and, last of all, some new Alaric will be found at 
the gates, some stronger race of emigrating invaders will 
appear, — civilization surely giving place to the necessary 
barbarism, just as the soil is turned over for new deposits 
of strengthening bone-dust. In short, the ruling principle 
is, " To every seed its own body." 

In his essay upon University Education delivered in 
Baltimore, at the opening of the Johns Hopkins Uni- 
versity, Professor Huxley said, in speaking of the future 
of America : " You are undertaking the greatest political 
experiment that has ever been performed by any people 



2o8 Essays of To-Day. 



whatever. At your next centenary, rational and probable 
expectation may look to see you two hundred million 
people ; and you have before you the problem whether two 
hundred million of English-speaking, strong-willed people 
will be able to hold together under the form of republican 
institutions, and under the real despotism of universal 
suffrage ; whether State rights will hold their own against 
the necessary centralization of a great Nation, if it is to act 
as a whole, or whether centralization will gain the day 
without breaking down republican institutions. The terri- 
tory you cover is as large as Europe, as diverse in climate 
as England and Spain, as France and Russia ; and you 
have to see, whether with the diversity of interests, mer- 
cantile and other, which arise under these circumstances, 
national ties will be stronger than the tendency to separa- 
tion. And as you grow, and the pressure of population 
makes itself manifest, the spectre of pauperism will stalk 
among you ; and you will be very unlike Europe, if com- 
munism and socialism do not claim to be heard. I cannot 
imagine that any one should envy you this great destiny ; 
for a great destiny it is, to solve these problems some way 
or other." 

Enough, then, for the nation as our illustration ; now let 
us come to the Church of to-day for our subject. Present- 
day Christianity may consist in many things, but for our 
present purpose it is enough that we recognize the side 
of material objectivity, whose exponent is the sacraments; 
and the side of subjectivity, whose sign is the emotions. 
The presence of Christ in the Sacrament is the gross 
extreme of one Hne ; the presence of the Holy Spirit on 



The Narrowness of Breadth. 209 

the telegraphic wire of the human feelings is the extreme 
of the opposite line. There is power in either of these 
phases of religiousness, when once these differing convic- 
tions become powerfully guiding ones. And between these 
two sides we find the balance to them both, in the correc- 
tive principle of breadth. 

Here, then, this third power stands, making itself felt 
somewhere in every Christian communion, recognizing the 
good in either of these two sides, and rejecting that which 
is weak ; trying to live and work in the open daylight 
of practical Christianity, as the others live and work, 
but, unconsciously, a Melchisedec, priest, and king, and 
arbiter, wittingly or unwittingly appealed to, and sorely 
tempted to do every thing carefully as to the critical 
faculty, rather than heartily as unto the Lord. Indeed, 
this constant strain to preserve the balance, this stretched- 
out effort to be always cultured in every thing, makes it 
at times a relief to hear a man like Moody in religion, or 
a Tammany Hall chieftain in politics, — men who are not 
cumbered with much philosophical serving, but who have 
their half-dozen strong convictions ; who do not bother 
themselves about the rear baggage of results, and have not 
a particle of fear about the consequences, either real or 
imaginary. To be very strong and forth-putting, to be 
resolute and aggressive, no set or school of men can afford 
to live always in the sign of the Libra. 

There is such a thing as too much of the tradesman's 
balancing of opposite tendencies in the Christian Church. 
There is such a feeble thing as the narrowness of breadth 
abroad in the Church to-day ; and it is concerning this 

14 



210 Essays of To- Day 



party tendency, that I raise my voice to-day, saying, 
Cassandra-like to the colossal image of freedom and force 
brought inside the walls of the Church, amid the shoutings 
of the rising party to-day, — 

" Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes ! " 

This paper, then, is a caveat ; it is an unwilling con- 
fession made openly, in order that a general absolution 
may be given, and that a second growth of moral force 
and purpose may come into some of our actions, that we 
may be like the men of Issachar who had understanding 
of the times, to know what Israel ought to do. 

Wisdom is, indeed, justified of her . children ; but if 
wisdom leaves no offspring, she is scarcely wise, — for 
without a nurturing and honoring offspring, she can never 
be cared for or remembered. 

The balance of power to-day, then, is with the men of 
earnest living, positive breadth, who are not afraid of the 
present, and are looking out with hope for the future. 
The tendency of all religions is to have their beginnings 
hidden, to come welling up from unseen springs in the 
earth, and to have their sources in a Nile-like mystery. 
Thus the tendency in religion is always to look back over 
the past ; to walk forward, to be sure, but to walk with the 
face thrown over the shoulder. This comes from religious 
antiquarianism, and from the necessarily deductive attitude 
of theology ; but in the development of every ethnic religion, 
and conspicuously in the development of Christianity, the 
tendency towards the conservation of past forces has pre- 
vailed over a willingness to accept new ones. There are 



TJie Narrowness of Breadth. 2 1 1 

always thinkers enough in the Christian Church, who are 
content to elaborate, after the Chinese method, endless in- 
ferences from a far-off condition of Confucianism. There 
are always radicals who shoot beyond the mark of the at- 
tainable and the reasonable. So that, after all, it rests with 
the balancing class of those who are at home in the age they 
live in, to play the part of the wise householder, who bringeth 
forth out of his treasury things new and old. The past is 
sure ; the present will take care of itself ; the future is the 
field in which the seeds of the present will show themselves. 

It is for this surely coming fruit that we are responsible ; 
and a moral necessity is laid upon every Christian teacher 
and leader of men, to be true to the needs of his genera- 
tion. Woe is to him, indeed, if he preach not a living gos- 
pel, that is a power amid the wants of the present ! It is 
because to-day's evening is the womb of to-morrow's morn- 
ing ; it is because the methods of the past lose their 
power in handling the questions of the present, — that a 
moral pressure, a Divine compulsive hand, is laid upon 
the children of each new generation, to lengthen the cords 
and tighten the stakes of that everlasting Tabernacle of his 
presence among men, which God hath pitched, and not 
man. 

Christ taught us that when our children in their hunger 
ask for bread, we are not to give them the stone that 
lies nearest to our feet ; or when they ask for that form of 
food which has healthful life in it, we are not to give them 
the crooked, distorted scorpion, poisoning with its venomed 
breath, and stinging with its rasping tail. 

Gamaliel's principle was, after all, a true and safe one. 



212 Essays of To-Day, 



If God is with any tendency of the times, who can be 
against it ? If any movement, which seems to have rehg- 
ious Hfe, falls, it will fall inevitably on its weak side, and 
will be swept away by some moral river Kishon, — that 
ancient river, that tributary torrent of God's wrath, which 
always follows the battle-fields of the Church on earth, to 
wash away all human failures and abuses. 

It becomes us then, I think, to pause and survey the 
ground behind us and before us. Giant Despair used to 
take his captives out every day for an airing, and show 
them the bones and skulls of his former guests ; then 
after a daily beating of his two lodgers, he would return 
them to their cell. The sight of dead men's or dead 
movement's bones is not a cheerful one, nor do I approve 
of any systematic well-thought-out plan of cudgelling one 
another. This hospitality of Doubting Castle is not a 
cheerful kind. Let us be watchful in this matter. There 
is a danger in that very breadth which is the glory of this 
newly rising school. There is a true breadth and a false 
breadth. There is a powerful phase of it, and there is a 
weak phase of it ; and it is of this weak side, this higher 
breadth which eventually becomes narrowness, that I am 
now writing. 

But what is this narrowness of breadth 1 Let us see. 

It consists in many things ; in many habits of thought, 
in many tendencies and moods, which belong to certain 
forms of religious and theological bias, and are quite as 
marked and peculiar as the bias of class, caste, custom, or 
profession. In looking at this subject, we must remember 
that the Christian Church is not a philosopher's club of 



TJie Narrowness of Breadth. 2 1 3 

the Daniel Deronda pattern, where an inspired but erratic 
Mordecai feels commissioned to arouse the undeveloped 
souls of any company made up of men who are well mean- 
ing and cultured, but who, after all, belong to the genus of 
the amateur philosopher. 

Remembering that the Christian Church is something 
wider, and more mixed, than a philosopher's club, we must 
have an honest, definite purpose to bless and help our 
fellow men, — not only and always to criticise them ; not 
only and always to throw them in the scale of the avoir- 
dupois weights, and try our hats on them, and measure 
the circumference and weight of their brains. We must 
remember that those who live on different mental planes, 
demand our sympathy and support, if they are earnest 
and true men, quite as much as if they were all Michaels 
and Gabriels, God's chosen archangels. 

We must not think that the tribe songs of those who 
differ from us are all cant ; we must know that there is a 
reality under what we often call cant ; we must learn to 
look through much weakness, chaff, and foolishness even, 
and to recognize substantial results underlying these. We 
must lead men by our kindly influence : we cannot afford 
to crowd them, with the compressed air of our critical 
pressure. 

We must recognize the good in every effort, where good 
is done within the Church's walls, unless we are willing to 
hand over the banner of leadership to some newer, fresher 
power ; unless we are ready to become a negative, critical 
sect, croaking back, like a nest of jackdaws, to every sound 
that passes our elevated stand-point. 



2 1 4 Essays of To-Day. 



I have said that this narrowness of breadth consists in 
many things, — in habits of thought, and mental tendencies, 
and moods. We have seen how it may affect us in our 
dealings with one another, and especially with those who 
differ from us. Let us now look at it in a wider aspect, 
and apply this same principle to the theological and eccle- 
siastical and social world ; or to doctrine, church govern- 
ment, and the mixed border-land of society. 

I. First, then, we look at this subject with reference to 
Christian doctrine, or theology. " God giveth it a body as 
it hath pleased him, and to every seed its own body." This 
is our subject's refrain. Yes, and to every body is given 
its own seed or germ again. We have had the seed of this 
movement of breadth. We have at present its corporate 
manifestation or expression. What shall the seed of the 
future be t The fruit only will reveal the seed ; autumnal 
results alone can suffice for spring blossoms. 

If any school of Christian thought would hold the field 
for the future, it must see to it that the coming race of 
theologians and teachers hold and promulgate that which 
is definite and dogmatic ; that there shall be a positive 
forth-putting of suggestive, creative doctrine, a flood-tide 
of reserve power coming in to meet the questions of 
the age continually, — not the hot, dead, noonday unin- 
teresting calm, the cumulative gatherings of others, the 
researches of all sorts and conditions of men, any assorted 
lot of which we can take, as our fancy pleases us. In a 
sermon entitled " The Church's Law of Development," 
delivered before the New York Episcopal Convention 
of 1872, Rev. Dr. John Cotton Smith speaks, in one 



The Narrowness of Breadth. 2 1 5 

place of the latest school in the Church of England as 
follows: — 

" Among the prominent ideas in the Broad-Church movement 
is the widening of the catholicity of the Church by reducing its 
dogmatic basis. The principle upon which it proceeds is, that 
the fewer and more fundamental the things which the Church 
requires to be believed, the greater will be the number of those 
who will adhere to the Church. That this tendency may be and 
has been carried to such an extent as to threaten the sacrifice of 
some of the fundamental articles of the faith, must be admitted. 

But when we remember how, in modern times, the ancient 
creeds have been overlaid with cumbrous confessions and elaborate 
theological systems, and what a fruitful source has thus been 
opened of controversy and division, this movement must be 
regarded as having a salutary character, in so far as it is a protest 
against that traditionalism which constantly adds to the things to 
be believed, and is also an assertion of the sufficiency of the 
universal creeds of Christendom. 

It is, in this aspect of it, essentially a catholic as opposed to a 
sectarian school." 

To which we answer, This is true ! Reduce your 
dogmatic basis, but make the essence of your reduction 
strong. Sift your company at the water-courses of Truth, 
but be sure and have a Gideon's band with you, though 
they believe only in a creed of three articles, God, pitchers, 
and trumpets ! 

The present is not an age for religious whims and theo- 
logical tricks of the trade. Rhetoric alone will not answer 
now ; pietism will always be essentially a side issue in the 
unfolding of Christianity. What is wanted at present is 
clearly-cut thought ; the inspiration of a reasonable as well 
as a religious and holy hope. It will not do to be for 



2 1 6 Essays of To- Day. 



ever saying that our Faith is a great mystery, a piece of 
supernaturalism, dimly seen and darkly comprehended, 
whichever way we look at it. The dogmatic basis may 
well be shortened, but that which is left ought to be clear, 
positive, succinct, and well thought out. Nothing but this 
solid kind of work, well done, can command in the present 
age of specialities the respect and confidence of the thou- 
sand critics, who are ever ready to sit in judgment upon a 
new thought, movement, or tendency within the traditional 
walls of the accepted Christianity. 

I. Take, for instance, the six general departments of 
systematic Divinity. Theology proper must give us a true 
rendering of the problem of Personality and the Infinite, as 
opposed to the brilHant but unphilosophical objections of 
Matthew Arnold, to a belief in the being of God as one 
who loves and hates. As Mr. Knight says, in a recent 
article on this subject, in the "Contemporary Review," 
" In his [Arnold's] attack on what he terms the * God of 
Metaphysics,' in his elaborate critical assault, lacking neither 
in 'vigor nor in rigor,' on the notion of personality in 
God, he removes the very basis of theology, and the whole 
superstructure of science becomes fantastic and unreal. 
He is sanguine of laying the basis of a ' religion more se- 
rious, potent, awe-inspiring, and profound than any which 
the world has seen ; ' but he builds it on the ruins of the 
theistic philosophies of the past. These, therefore, must 
in the first instance be levelled with the ground, and the 
debris removed. We are to find the elements of a relig- 
ion — new, indeed, but in the highest degree hopeful, 
solemn, and profound — only when we renounce the delu- 



The Narrowness of Bi^eadth. 2 1 7 

sion that God is a person, regarding it as a fairy tale, as 
figure, and personification, and of the same scientific value 
as the personification of the Sun or the Wind." 

But leaving Arnold and his defenders, and his reviewers 
and his opposers, I go back to the metaphysics of Sir 
William Hamilton ; and there I come upon the old state- 
ments made in his chapter upon the Philosophy of the 
Conditioned, which saves our Christian theology, after all, 
from being the whimsical blue-light or Roman candle of 
the individual who happens to fire it off, in this or that 
mental torch-light parade. 

" I lay it down as a law," he says, ** which, though not 
generalized by philosophers, can easily be proved to be 
true by its application to the phenomena, that all that is 
conceivable in thought lies between two extremes, which as 
contradictory of each ether cannot both be true, bict of which, 
as mutual contradictories^ one inustT 

Then follows the famihar illustration of space : " It is 
plain that space must either be bounded or not bounded. 
These are contradictory alternatives ; on the principle of 
contradiction, they cannot both be true ; and on the prin- 
ciple of excluded middle, one must be true. This cannot 
be denied without denying the primary laws of intelligence. 
But thougJi space must be admitted to be necessarily either 
finite or infinite^ we are able to conceive the possibility 
neither of its finitude nor of its ijifnity!' And then the 
argument is carried up by the illustrations of time and 
thought, through the problem of the mind's limitedness, to 
the admitted truth that a Deity u7iderstood would be no 
Deity at all. For to say that the infinite can be thought. 



2i8 Essays of To-Day. 



but only inadequately thought, is a contradiction : it is the 
same as saying that the infinite can be known, but only 
known as finite. 

This broad method of reasoning, such as Matthew 
Arnold gives us, with all its fascination, is yet charlatan- 
ism, looked at with the standards and weights of philosophy. 
It is Turnerism in painting, Carlyleism in history, Wag- 
nerism in music. It is striking, glaring, bizarre ; but it is 
not for all men, or for many men. 

We need to hear that refrain coming to us with its 
accompanying melody, which the soloist gives over and 
over again with such effect, in the music of Handel's 
Judas Maccabeus, — 

"Wise men, flattering, may deceive you 

With their vain mysterious art : 

Magic charms can ne'er relieve you, 

Nor can heal the wounded heart. , 

But true wisdom can relieve you, — 

God-like wisdom from above : 
This alone can ne'er deceive you, 

This alone all pains remove." 

So then, in this first great department of systematic 
Divinity, this fons et origo of all dogmatic theology, there 
can be no trifling, no turning away, no philosophical shy- 
ing off, from the admitted personality of Him who upon 
Mount Sinai spake these words, and said, "Thou shalt 
have no other gods before Me ! " 

2. Then, secondly, follows the world of Christology, — the 
historical fact of the person of Jesus Christ, and the further 
catholic fact that He is the Son of God from heaven. In 



The Narrowness of Breadth. 219 

the midst of perplexity and confusion, in the presence of 
materiaHsm, in the rush of the torrent of souls day by day 
into eternity, when we feel like asking, Can immortality, 
after all, be true ? — there stands out that far-off wondrous 
life, with the words of truth revealed in the Gospel, which 
come to us with a new meaning, in the presence of the 
experimental doubts and fears and vicissitudes of life. 
Here, certainly, finding as we do in Christ both the 
revealer of the Father in heaven, and the interpreter of 
the human heart upon earth, is plenty of sea-room for new, 
fresh currents of positive doctrinal thought. 

3. Thirdly, comes the problem of Salvation, — soteri- 
ology as the Doctors call it ; " the plan of redemption," as 
the average Sunday-school teacher continually renders it. 
Surely, no movement which would be a power to-day, for 
the spread of Christ's kingdom of truth in the midst of a 
sinful world, can afford to be coy about using the phrase- 
ology, or the practical methods, of those who live only 
within the narrow fence-line of their provincial surround- 
ings, and yet who do their work faithfully and well. Did 
Christ die for us } Is thei-e such a thing as an Atone- 
ment ? Are we saved by Jesus Christ .? 

We must learn to say yes or no fairly and decidedly to 
these questions, without hemming and hawing; without this 
continual tendency to declare, before we give any decided 
opinion of the matter, that there is a great deal to be said 
upon both sides. We must hold and teach some doctrine 
of the Atonement, if we would not wither away as a fair 
but fragile flower of thought, preserved among the pressed 
leaves and grasses of by-gone sects. 



220 Essays of To- Day, 



If it is not Bishop Magee, it can be McLeod Campbell ; 
if it is not the theory of Simeon, nor yet the theory of 
Robertson, it may be something definite within the wide 
doctrinal space between these two given points. But if 
redemption by Christ means any thing to us, — and it can 
never truly mean any thing until it means every thing, — 
then we must teach it and preach it, and keep it at the head 
of the Christian host, if, like the astonished Constantine at 
the Fulvian bridge, we wish to change the face of the world, 
and by it conquer. 

4. Anthropology must receive, too, its definite method of 
teaching. We must know whether there is such a thing 
as a Fall, and what is meant by it. We must be prepared 
to teach one way or the other, — either that sin is guilt, or 
else only a blunder ; or perhaps both, since a tumble down 
the stairs helps a child to go up again understandingly. 
Luther said that man's three stages of development were 
nature, grace, and glory. There is to-day a strange analogy 
in many ways between the processes of science and those 
of religion, — as seen in the doctrines of election and the 
origin of the soul, and the survival of the fittest. 

Is the Fall to be regarded as a fall upstairs or down- 
stairs } and have we come to our nature's best, in the 
evolution-like way in which the modern horse has come 
from the Orohippus and Hipparion } ^ 

5. Then there is the fifth category of theology, — the doc- 
trines concerning the Church proper, its institutional life 
and origin, its methods of development and increase, and 

1 See Professor Huxley's lecture on " Evidences of Evolution," at Chick- 
ering Hall, New York, Oct. 22, 1876, — "New York Tribune" Extra, 
No. 36. 



TJie Narrowness of Breadth. 221 

all that is included in the world of ecclesiology, of which 
we shall speak presently. 

6. And last of all comes the question of futurity, — escha- 
tology, — with its belief in the life everlasting, its doctrine of 
heaven and of hell. What is heaven } what is hell } what is 
paradise } what is the intermediate state } what is the day 
of judgment.'* what is our Lord's second coming.!* what is 
the instinct for prayers for the dead t what is the germ 
meaning of the Romish belief in purgatory } what the 
philosophy of Swedenborg's theory of the rising and fall- 
ing heavens and hells t All these old subjects are being 
unearthed by the strong and driving ploughshare of present 
investigation. What shall the seed be that the coming 
teachers will plant in these vacant furrows } 

How, then, can any growing school afford to risk the 
leadership of Christian thought, by hurling an interrogation 
mark after any or all of these fundamental doctrines of 
Christianity, and leaving it to the jumble of chaos to bring 
light and order out of all this confusion } 

True, the man who rejoices in his breadth may take 
pride in the thought that he has reduced the basis of the 
Church's dogmatic teaching ; but still upon him rests, after 
all, the moral responsibility of making firm, and positive, 
and compact that which remains to be taught and to be 
believed. And over against his own philosophical ex- 
planations of Christian doctrines is set the vast bulk of 
humanity, who believe only the popular gospel, according 
to Lord Bacon's dictwn, — " Religion is for the masses, and 
philosophy is only for the few." 

I remember once being called upon, in the absence ot 



222 Essays of To- Day. 



a church choir, to lead a congregation in their hymns. 
The minister in charge asked me what I would sing. I 
replied, "Let us have Hamburg for one tune." "Very 
well," said he, " that will do." *' Oh," said the organist, 
"but I don't like Hamburg." "That," replied the minis- 
ter, " is not what I asked you. It is not a question of 
what yoii like ; it is a question of what the people will 
si7ig!' 

And though art critics may object to popular music, and 
may reduce it to the term chaos^ still if that music touches 
the human heart, and becomes in any way the exponent 
of deep, rehgious feeling, the matter settles itself ; for the 
people will sing what is real to them, though a gallery full 
of professional organists do not like it. 

And so it is here, in the matter of teaching and explain- 
ing Christian truth. It is the narrowness of artistic 
breadth which stands afar off, and cries, " I do not like 
such doctrines ! " It is true, practical breadth which says, 
" I will never be above my work. I will not stand off, and 
rail and criticise ; I will go in and lead, and will not willingly 
yield this privilege of leadership to others ! " 

II. I have been speaking of our duty in the matter of 
reforming the line of Christian truth. We now approach 
the second department of this subject, — the ecclesiastical 
world. We hear a great deal in these days about the 
Church. Much of this talk is utterly without meaning. It 
is the way the Masons and Odd Fellows and Independent 
Order of Red Men talk about their Lodges. It is corpora- 
tion-glorying ; it is the pride of ecclesiastical respectability, 
and is an unconscious class bias. But under this cheap 



The Narrowness of Breadth, 223 

talk there is a hidden power, which I think is coming out 
to the Hght, with a new meaning in these days. 

Men are seeing to-day that there is a special form of 
power in a willing ecclesiastical, over a forced theological, 
union ; in which, for the sake of liberty, and to avoid doc- 
trinal friction, the girdle is put around the form of govern- 
ment and the method of work, rather than around the 
detailed minuteness of the creed ! The Church as a work- 
ing organization, meeting the issues and problems of the 
world, and not leaving them to philanthropical coteries and 
humanitarian corporations, seems much stronger, much 
more like the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, than scho- 
lastic debating societies, such as the Council of Trent, the 
Synod of Dort, and the Hampton Conference. 

For the sect in time outgrows the issue which gave it 
birth. The world creeps up, at last, to the old mooted 
question of controversy ; and if the tide of human thought 
is with it, if it strikes a drift of opinion, a decided current 
or tendency of the times, it soon leaves the long debated 
problem behind it. 

This was the philosophical idea underlying Dr. Ewer's 
much debated book, " The Failure of Protestantism." The 
world has got beyond mere dogmatic Protestantism against 
the Church of Rome. There are issues to meet now, in 
other directions, which require positive assertion, not nega- 
tive protesting. 

The strife which gave us Calvinism ; and the reaction of 
Channing, which brought into full flower New England 
Unitarianism ; even the special pleading of Universalism, 
which in its argnmentnm ad hominem dogmatically affirms 



224 Essays of To- Day. 



that mankind is doomed to be saved, and that quickly, 
whether fit for heaven or not ; the doctrine of election, the 
literal interpretation of New Testament prophecy, and per- 
fection, — must expect ere long to have Hezekiah's label of 
Nehushtan, " It is nothing," fastened upon them ; for the 
dust of the mentally swept world is already beginning to 
settle on them, — and when the dust gathers, we know 
that the doctrines are let alone, and are not handled any 
more. 

It ought to be, then, that the school which is wisely 
broad, should see the true power and beauty there is in the 
ecclesiastical rather than in the theological Church, and 
should be able to peer through ecclesiasticism and the dull 
ecclesiastic, and recognize and seize, in its true conception, 
the essential truth that is embedded there. Good church- 
manship means, with the average mind, the harmonious 
working of the Church's functional life in every depart- 
ment. The narrowness of breadth despises this popular 
conception, and now and then is tempted to put on the 
latest air brakes, in order to convince the passengers what 
an imperfect conveyance the traditional train is. Here, 
then, it seems to me, there is danger, in trifling with the 
popular ideal, and risking the forfeiture of wise and prac- 
tical and comprehensive leadership. 

III. Then, after dogmatic truth and the Church's practi- 
cal life, comes the third department, where a wise breadth 
should extend its influence to the exclusion of a narrow 
breadth, — the social world. Here is a mixed borderland, 
over which the shadows of sin and the influences of truth 
and goodness alternately mingle. It is a land where the 



The Narrowness of Breadth. 225 

influence of the Christian Church ought, conspicuously, to 
manifest itself. 

For instance, there is a written law in a certain religious 
community, which denounces in unmeasured terms the 
sins of horse-racing and theatre-going. Fast horses and 
the drama are put into the syllabus of anathema, on the 
ground that they are unrighteous, and that all unrighteous- 
ness is sin. I have heard this action denounced as narrow 
and puritanical. But why smile at it t Surely it is a 
radical and a Christian cure. If there is nothing offered 
to take its place, if the genius of breadth is powerless to 
draw the line between sin and holiness, — why, then, the 
genius of narrowness must do the work. And thus it is 
with the temperance movement ; with incipient com- 
munism ; with free love and Oneida communities ; with 
obscene literature ; with societies for the suppression of 
vice, and a horrible underground world of social sins. 

In meeting such questions as these, there are at present 
two lines of development left open to the religious and 
social reformer. The one is the method of Individualism, 
with its strong and its weak sides ; the other is the method 
of Institutionalism, with its understood and misunderstood 
capabilities. 

The Church as the flowering expression of the indi- 
vidual's subjective experience, and the Church as the 
aggregate working of average common-sense and ability, 
managed and controlled by lawful authority and headship, 
contend to-day for precedence, in carrying on those social 
reforms which press home upon our every-day Christian 
consciousness. 

15 



226 Essays of To- Day. 



Let us leave the subject here. There are undoubted 
indications that the present is a slowly settling epoch of 
transition, from the fixity of the past doctrinal and ethical 
and social statements, to a newer and a wider and a more 
positive one. The field is still the world. But the world's 
shadows must flee away, before the advancing light of 
Him who is calling the earth, from the rising of the sun 
unto the going down thereof. 

The leadership of the Christian Church is with any 
formative school which, in holding the present, preoccupies 
the future with its present germs of thought. But when- 
ever the front line wavers and is broken, whenever it is 
powerless to handle the difficulties it meets on its march, 
some more rugged power will surely take its place; and 
when the combat deepens, and the brave as ever rush in, 
God himself, the great Householder of all truth, will call 
to the front again, as He has always done in the past, a 
new race of prophets of good things which are ever to 
come. 

We have had the seed of past religious movements ; 
to-day we inhabit the body of what was once only a germ, 
— for God giveth to every tendency, as to every seed, its 
own body, as it hath pleased Him. What shall the coming 
seed be .-^ 



Original Sin. 227 



XII. 

ORIGINAL SIN. 

L^ROM an expedition made " through the dark conti- 
nents " of theology, it has been my good luck to 
return unharmed to the every-day duties of life, bring- 
ing back with me some of the spoils of the journey. I 
have put these fauna and flora into a systematic shape, 
though, from the quantity of extracts made, I can claim 
little else for myself than the office of the frail thread 
which holds the stems of the cut flowers together. To 
come back to the opening illustration, I would say that 
the point of departure into the "wilderness of sin," the 
"Zanzibar" base from which the start was made, has been 
the Ninth Article of the Thirty-nine Articles of the 
Episcopal Church. 

With these few words as an introduction, let us enter 
upon the subject before us, — the meaning of that term 
which stands at the head of all anthropology, " Original 
Sin." This, as the Ninth Article of the Church declares, 
is the "fault and corruption of the nature of every man 
that naturally is engendered of the offspring of Adam, 
whereby man is very far gone from original righteousness, 
and is of his own nature inclined to evil." 

That man is a sinner, is the lesson of all human his- 
tory, of daily observation, and of every man's conscience. 



228 Essays of To-Day. 



Euripides, Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Cicero, and Socrates, 
among the heathen philosophers, make strong admis- 
sions in regard to the moral imperfection and native 
depravity of man. Ovid, in his '* Metamorphoses," says, 
"Video melior proboque, deteriora sequor," — a passage 
singularly like St. Paul's complaint, " What I would I do 
not ; but what I hate, that I do. The good that I would I 
do not ; but the evil which I would not, that I do." To 
account for this universal fact, these philosophers traced 
the origin of sin in the body to what they considered 
the essentially evil nature of matter. The early Gnostic 
heretics did the same ; while the Manicheans, like the 
Marcionites before them, held that man's actions were 
influenced by the stars. But the great battle was waged 
during the Pelagian controversy. This decided truth 
and error ; and all later disputes upon the doctrine of 
Original Sin have been but reproductions in some form 
or other of Augustinianism, or Pelagianism, or the com- 
promising mean of semi-Pelagianism. The doctrines 
charged against Coelestius, the companion of Pelagius, 
at the Council of Carthage were, " That Adam was created 
mortal, and would have died whether he had sinned or not ; 
that the sin of Adam hurt only himself ; that infants new- 
born are in the same state Adam was before his fall ; that 
a man may be without sin, and keep God's commandments 
if he will." 

The schoolmen in the Middle Ages, for the most part, 
seem to have considered original righteousness as some- 
thing superadded to the original nature of man, — as "an 
ornament upon a maiden's hair" is not a part of herself. 



Original Sin. 229 



Original sin was, therefore, the loss or privation of original 
righteousness. The body, they held, was infected by the 
Fall, but the soul suffered only because deprived of that 
which Adam possessed, — the presence of God and super- 
natural righteousness, — and as having the imputation of sin 
derived from Adam. This was the germ of the Roman 
hypothesis of the " donum supernaturale," brought forward 
at the Council of Trent; where it was further decreed, 
" (i) That Adam, by transgressing, lost holiness and justice, 
and was infected both in soul and body ; (2) That by the 
grace of baptism the guilt of original sin is remitted, and 
that all is removed which hath the true and proper nature 
of sin ; (3) The tenet of the * donum supernaturale ' was es- 
tablished ; (4) That apostasy involves the loss of a super- 
natural, but not of a natural, gift ; (5) That concupiscence, 
or the infection of original sin remaining in the regene- 
rate, is not truly and properly sin." Such was the Tri- 
dentine theory of original sin. 

The three commonly accepted hypotheses with regard 
to the origin of the soul have been allied to the doctrine 
of Original Sin, and have been used, in part, as a solution 
of that problem. Thus, Justin Martyr and the great Origen, 
believing in the Pythagorean hypothesis of a pre-existent 
state, referred original sin to sin committed in that state. 
In the words of Dr. Shedd, "In the Middle Ages the theory 
of Creationism prevailed, and Traducianism fell into disre- 
pute with the schoolmen for two reasons ; first, because they 
regarded it as conflicting with the doctrine of the soul's 
immortality, and as materializing in its influence ; secondly, 
because, rejecting as most of them did the anthropology of 



230 Essays of To- Day. 



Augustine and adopting the Greek anthropology, they had 
less motive than Augustine had for favoring the theory of 
the soul's traduction." At the time of the Reformation, 
Traducianism went hand in hand with the revival of the 
doctrines of Grace, and with the spread of Augustine's 
anthropology, — though Calvin and Melancthon on the 
Continent, and Bishop Hooper in England, still held to 
the mediaeval theory of Creationism. 

The point upon which the Lutherans differed most ma- 
terially from the decisions of the Council of Trent, was 
in maintaining that concupiscence had the nature of sin, 
and that the infection, though not the imputation, of sin 
remained in the baptized and regenerate. This is shown 
in the Second Article of the Augsburg Confession, from 
which the Ninth Article of the Church of England was 
derived. 

I do not wish to plunge into the depths of the Calvinistic 
and Arminian controversy, nor to explore the Socinian 
objections to the fundamental doctrine of Original Sin. 
Suffice it hastily to skim over the points upon which the 
Arminians differ from the Calvinists with regard to this 
doctrine, — first noticing the distinction between the supra- 
lapsarian and the sublapsarian hypotheses in the Calvin- 
istic system ; the first holding that God decreed that Adam 
should fall, the second holding that Adam sinned of his 
own free will. Supralapsarianism is the Calvinistic theory 
pushed to its farthest logical extremity; " sublapsarianism 
is philosophically lame, for if the divine decrees be eternal 
and universal, to suppose any thing omitted from God's 
predestination is as absurd as. to suppose any thing over- 



Original Sin. 231 



looked in His omniscience." Dr. Shedd thus succinctly 
states the opposition of the Arminians to the Calvinistic 
theory: ''(i) The Arminians assert that original sin is 
not guilt, and that a decree of reprobation to eternal pun- 
ishment could not be founded upon it. (2) That original 
sin does not include a sinful inclination of the ivill ; it is 
an inherited corruption, whose seat is the physical and 
intellectual parts, but not the voluntary. (3) That, by rea- 
son of original sin, man is unable of himself to be morally 
perfect and holy ; but inasmuch as the inherited corrup- 
tion, which is the cause of this inability, is involuntary, 
the inability is a tnisfortune and not a fanlt. (4) That 
Adam's act of apostasy was purely individual, and therefore 
cannot be imputed to his posterity as guilt. (5) That the 
will of man, though not competent perfectly to obey the 
law of God without the assisting influence of the Holy 
Spirit, is competent to co-operate with that assistance; and 
(6) That the influence of the Holy Spirit is granted, upon 
condition that the human will concurs and co-works." 
Consequently, election is conditional upon the foreseen faith 
and good works of the elect. 

Thus the battles fought out in the fifth century upon 
the doctrines of man's helplessness, original sin, and the 
freedom of the will, with the compromising views of such 
semi-Pelagian theologians as Cassianus of Marseilles in 
the Western Church, and Theodore of Mopsuestia in the 
Eastern, have all been fought over again by schoolmen in 
the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries, and by Papal 
councils and warring reformers in the fifteenth century. 

Not to linger upon the history of the development of 



232 Essays of To- Day. 



this doctrine, as that is not our subject, let us see in what 
original sin consists, as described by our Article, and the 
Scripture proofs of this doctrine. 

Original sin is not imputed to us, either (according to 
Augustine) because we were actually with Adam when he 
sinned, or because he was in any sense our representative 
or federal head, or because God saw that each man would 
have committed Adam's sin if placed in his position. It 
is through the propagation of a sinful and fallen nature, 
whereby a moral disorder affecting the entire man, phy- 
sical and intellectual as well as moral, is produced, that 
original sin or inherent depravity belongs by nature to 
each one of us. " Original sin consists in a loss of the 
true centre of man's moral being ; and is total in the sense 
of pervading the whole man, and universal in the sense of 
involving all mankind from their very birth. It consists, 
then, negatively in alienation from God ; and positively 
in a consequent prevailing tendency or bias to evil." As 
stated by the Ninth Article, there are five points connected 
with this doctrine: (i) Original sin is universal; (2) It is 
propagated ; (3) Its degree is given — man is very far gone, 
*'quam longissime," from original righteousness ; (4) It de- 
serves God's condemnation ; and (5) Its infection remains 
in the regenerate, and concupiscence has the nature of 
sin. There is in this Article no ground for the doctrine 
of the imputation of Adam's sin to his descendants, as a 
counter doctrine for that of the imputation of Christ's 
righteousness to believers. On this point Bishop Browne 
remarks : " Calvin himself seems rather to have held that 
all men were liable to condemnation, because of their own 



Original Sin. 233 



sinfulness derived from Adam, not because of the imputa- 
tion of Adam's sin." 

Our next step is to inquire into the Scriptural account 
of the Fall, which did not, according to Milton, bring 
''death into the world," since in the pre-Adamite age there 
were 

"Dragons of the prime 
That tare each other in their slime," 

but which brought '^ all our woe, with loss of Eden." 

There are four theories of the Fall of Man. The first 
is the allegorical, which many have thought difficult to 
suppose, since an allegory would not be inserted in the 
midst of Scripture fact, without any mark, or sign, or inti- 
mation. The second is the mythical, which is adopted by 
modern rationalists; but this interpretation is exposed to 
the same objections as the former, and is of the nature of 
a pious fraud. The third is the literal and physical inter- 
pretation, which is that the tree of knowledge was a poison- 
ous tree, and that " the consequence of man's partaking of 
it was physical disorder, disease, and death, with an indirect 
action, through the nervous system and sensuous nature, 
upon the intellect and moral character." This is the view 
of Whately and Knapp. The fourth is the interpretation 
which is literal as to fact, but with a moral or symbolical 
signification, which was adopted by most of the early 
Fathers and reformers, and by Orthodox teachers. 

This last theory conducts us to the explanation of 
original sin already given ; namely, that of the propagation 
of a sinful and fallen nature. Of this there are two views : 
'* (i) Of the physical disorder of the body communicating 



234 Essays of To- Day. 



its corrupting influence to the soul ; and (2) a moral dis- 
order primarily, but ultimately involving the whole man, 
interpreting the flesh in the broad sense of opposition to 
the spirit." This latter is the one we have touched upon 
before, and corresponds best with Biblical teaching. 

Original sin, then, is the fault and corruption of our 
nature, the diseased condition of the being of man; it is the 
speck of dust in the eye, which prevents that organ from 
accomplishing its proper work, though the eye does not on 
that account cease to be an eye ; it is the grain of sand in 
the watch, which prevents its harmonious action, and clogs 
and interferes with its movement. It is the functional 
system of man — body, mind, and spirit — which is wrong; 
not the organic^ for man does not cease to be man, and 
become transformed into beast or devil. We may speculate 
as we please upon the origin of this fallen nature, or, as 
the central avenue to which all these by-ways lead, upon 
the origin of evil, upon where, when, and how evil came 
into being, or became the deprivation of good, if a nega- 
tive is preferred to a positive statement. We may make 
God the author of it, as Florinus did in one age. We 
may say that whatever God permits is right, and that, how- 
ever He may treat us, He will be just, — as Abelard held 
in mediaeval times. We may say with Alexander Pope, that 
"all partial evil is universal good," and thus join in the 
chorus which his deistical followers sang in the " Essay 
on Man," to the tune that " Whatever is, is right." 

Whatever view we take, whether we admit the fact and 
then throw it into a miscellaneous collection of unlabelled, 
undefined curiosities, as Strauss has done; or, admitting the 



Original Sin. 235 



fact of sin, call it by a new name, and dress it up in a novel 
rig, and call it " misdirection," as Theodore Parker has 
done, — fairly, honestly, and logically, we are thrown back 
upon the theory of the propagation of man's fallen nature, 
as the only solution of this mystery. Bushnell writes as 
follows : — 

" The genus humanity is still a single genus, comprehending the 
races ; and we know from geology that they had a begun existence. 
That they also sinned at the beginning is as clear, from the con- 
siderations already advanced, as if they had been one. Whence it 
follows that descendants of the sinning pairs or pair, born of na- 
tures thrown out of harmony and corrupted by sin, could not on 
principles of physiology, apart from Scripture teaching, be unaf- 
fected by the distempers of their parentage. They must be con- 
stituently injured or depravated. It is not even supposable that 
organic natures, injured and disordered as we have seen that hu- 
man bodies are by sin, should propagate their life in a progeny 
unmarred and perfect. If we speak of sin as action, their children 
may be innocent, and so far may reveal the loveliness of inno- 
cence ; still the crystalline order is broken ; the passions, tempers, 
appetites, are not in the proportions of harmony and reason ; the 
balance of original health is gone by anticipation, and a distem- 
pered action is begun, whose affinities sort with evil rather than 
with good. It is as if by their own sin they had just so far dis- 
tempered their organization. Thus far the fruit of sin is in them. 
And this the Scripture in a certain, popular, comprehensive way 
sometimes calls sin, because it is a condition of deprivation that 
may well enough be taken as the root of a guilty, sinning life. 
They do not undertake to settle metaphysically the point where 
personal guilt commences, but only suit their convenience in a 
comprehensive term that designates the race as sinners ; passing 
by those speculative questions that only divert attention from the 
salvation provided for a world of sinners. The doctrine of physi- 



236 Essays of To-Day. 

ology, therefore, is the doctrine of Original Sin, and we are held to 
inevitable orthodoxy by it, even if the Scriptures are cast away." ^ 

But even after all that can be said upon our nature as 
ruined by the Fall of Adam, original sin as connected v^dth 
each individual of the race seems a common calamity, a 
universal misfortune. We still think we are to be pitied 
rather than to be blamed. In answer to this indefinite but 
universal objection, let me mention the views of three 
thinkers upon this subject of the relation of the sin of the 
depraved nature to the sin of the individual man, or how 
Adam's original sin becomes our original sin. I refer 
to Anselm, Coleridge, and Miiller. To quote from Dr. 
Shedd: — 

"The phrase ^original sin,' says Anselm, may direct attention 
by the use of the word ' original,' either to the origin of human 
nature, or to the origin of the individual man. But so far as the 
origin of human nature itself is concerned, this is pure and holy. 
Original sin, consequently, must refer only to the origin of the 
individual man, — either to his nearer or his more remote origin ; 
either to his birth from immediate ancestors, or his descent from 
the first human pair. For every man possesses that universal 
quahty which is common to all men, namely, human nature ; and 
also that peculiar quality which distinguishes him from all other 
men, namely, his individuality. Hence, there is a twofold sin 
to be distinguished in man, — that sin which he receives in the 
reception of human nature, at the very first moment of his indi- 
vidual existence, and that which he afterwards commits as this 
or that particular individual. The first may be also denominated 
the sin of nature, — peccatmn natiirale ; yet it does not belong to 
the essence of human nature, but is only a condition or state into 
which the human nature has come since the creating act. Thus, 

■■ Nature and the Supernatural, p. 177. 



Original Sin. 237 



all sin, original as well as actual, is unrighteousness and guilt. But 
sin supposes the existence of the will, and how then can original 
sin be imputed to the infant, and why is the infant baptized for its 
remission ? Three facts must be taken into account in endeavor- 
ing to solve this difficult problem : ( i ) The fact that there is a 
common human nature ; (2) There is a particular individuality; 
and (3) The individual is a production from the nature. As 
merely possessing the common human nature, the infant partici- 
pates in no sin, guilt, or condemnation ; for abstract human 
nature is the pure creation of God. If the mere fact of being 
human were sufficient to constitute an individual man a sinner, 
then Adam himself would have been a sinner before his act of 
apostasy. Neither is the second characteristic — namely, that the 
infant possesses individuality — sufficient to account for his birth- 
sin ; for this, equally with the generic nature, is a creation of God. 
The third fact, consequently, alone remains by which to explain 
the sin and guilt that belongs to every man at birth : the fact, 
namely, that the individual is produced out of the nature, and the 
nature has apostatized subsequent to its creation." 

Descent, then, or the propagation of an apostate nature, 
is the fact by which Anselm accounts for the existence of 
sin in every individual man at birth. And he considered 
the miraculous and anomalous birth of Christ, by v^^hich he 
was kept out of the line of ordinary human generation, as 
indicating that sin unavoidably flows down within that 
line. In endeavoring to impart a notion of the precise 
relation of that which is individual to that which is generic, 
he makes a distinction between the sin which the nature 
in Adam originates, and the sin which the individual after 
Adam commits, or, in technical phrase, between " original" 
and " actual " sin. In the case of Adam, an individual 
transgression resulted in a sin of nature ; while, in the case 



238 Essays of To- Day 



of his posterity, a sin of nature results in individual trans- 
gressions. Adam, by a single distinct .transgression, intro- 
duced a corruption into that entire human nature which 
was in, and one with, himself. Here the individual vitiates 
the generic, because the generic is included in the indi- 
vidual. Adam's posterity, as so many distinct individualiza- 
tions of this vitiated human nature, act out this corruption, 
each in his day and generation. Here the generic vitiates 
the individual. In the instance of the progenitor, the 
"actual" sin, or the sin of a single act, originates the 
original sin, or the sin of nature and disposition. In 
the instance of the posterity, the " original " sin, or the sin 
of the nature, originates the sin of single acts, or "actual" 
transgressions. In the first instance, the individual cor- 
rupts the nature ; in the last instance, the nature corrupts 
the individiuil} 

The views of Coleridge on this subject, of which we 
can make but a very condensed abstract, are to be found 
in his " Aids to Reflection," in a comment upon Bishop 
Jeremiy Taylor's statement of the doctrine of Original Sin. 
Bishop Taylor says : " Like ships in a storm, every one 
hath enough to do to outride it ; but when they meet, be- 
sides the evils of the storm, they find the intolerable ca- 
lamity of their mutual concussion ; and every ship that is 
ready to be oppressed with the tempest, is a worse tem- 
pest to every vessel against which it is violently dashed. 
So it is in mankind. Every man hath evil enough of his 
own, and it is hard for a man to live up to the rule of 

1 Abbreviated from Dr. Shedd's "History of Christian Doctrine," vol. 
ii. chap. 5. 



Original Sin, 239 



his own reason and conscience." And then, in reply to 
Taylor, who uses the phraseology of the semi-Pelagians, — 
after a careful introduction to his subject, namely, the 
relation of original sin to the individual, and the respon- 
sibility of each one of us for that which is our sin and 
not our misforhuie merely, — he says : " The word original 
or originant is not applicable, and, without abuse of lan- 
guage, can never be applied to a mere link in a chain of 
effects, where each, indeed, stands in the relation of a cause 
to those that follow, but is at the same time the effect of 
all that precede. For in these cases, a cause amounts to 
little more than an antecedent. At the utmost, it means 
only a conductor of the causative influence ; and the old 
axiom, cansa cattsce, causa cansati, applies with a never- 
ending regress to each several link, along the whole chain 
of Nature. But this is Nature ; and no natural thing or act 
can be called originant, or be truly said to have an origin 
in any other. The. moment we assume an origin in Nature, 
a true beginning, an actual first, that moment we rise above 
Nature, and are compelled to assume a supernatural power, 
(Gen. i. i.) . . . In this sense of the word 'original,' and 
in the sense before given of sin, it is evident that the 
phrase * original sin ' is a pleonasm, the epithet not adding 
to the thought, but only enforcing it. For if it be sin, it 
must be original ; and a state or act that has not its origin 
in the will, may be calamity, deformity, disease, or mis- 
chief, but a sin it cannot be." He then proceeds : " It 
is not enough that the act appears voluntary, or that it 
is intentional, or that it has the most hateful passions or 
debasing appetites for its proximate cause and accompa- 



240 Essays of To-Day. 



niment. All these may be found in a mad-house, where 
neither law nor humanity permit us to condemn the actor 
of sin. The reason of law declares the maniac not a free 
agent, and the verdict follows of course, * Not guilty.' The 
maniac, it is well known, is often found clever and in- 
ventive in the selection and adaptation of means to his 
ends ; but his ends are madness. He has lost his reason. 
For though reason in finite beings is not the will, — or 
how could the will be opposed to reason.^ — yet it is the 
condition, the stJie qtia non of a free will. . . . Sin is evil 
having an origin ; but inasmuch as it is evil, in God it can- 
not originate; and yet in some spirit — that is, in some 
supernatural power — it must ; for in Nature there is no 
origin. Sin, therefore, is spiritual evil ; but the spiritual 
in man is the will. Now, when we do not refer to any par- 
ticular sins, but to that state and constitution of the will 
which is the ground, condition, and common cause of all 
sins, we may, with no less propriety than force, entitle this 
dire spiritual evil and source of all evil, which is absolutely 
such, original sin. I have said, ' the corrupt nature of the 
will' I might add, that the admission of a nature into a 
spiritual essence by its own act of corruption." 

He then reviews at length Bishop Taylor's position, show- 
ing that, according to his statement of the fact, original sin 
is nothing less than the " universal calamity " of human 
nature ; and attacks his citation of the case of the hanging 
of Saul's children, — who were all equally innocent, but 
who were sacrificed to a point of State expediency, — as a 
similar one to the posterity of Adam, and God's dealings 
with them. " Because Jonathan was David's friend, his 



Original Sin. 241 



son Mephibosheth was spared ; and because Michal had 
treated him unhandsomely, her sons, simply because they 
were in the line of Saul, were put to death. Thus evil 
fell upon the sons of Michal which would never have be- 
fallen them, had their mother been kind to David ; and 
Jonathan's son was spared, not because of any intrinsic 
merit of his own, but because of his father's friendship for 
David. Adam was to God as Michal to David." To the 
question, On what principles of equity were the innocent 
offspring of Adam punished at all .'* he answers : " God on 
Adam's account was so exasperated with mankind, that, 
being angry. He would still continue the punishment." 
Coleridge then contrasts the Scriptural article respecting 
original sin, or the corrupt and sinful nature of the human 
will ; first showing that this is not a new tenet introduced 
and imposed upon us by Christianity, but that the Brah- 
minical, Scandinavian, and Grecian mythologies, — the last 
with its wonderful fable of Prometheus, with the characters 
of the rebellious spirit and of the divine friend of man- 
kind, — all recognize the fact of a moral corruption con- 
natural with the human race. " In the assertion of original 
sin," he continues, *' the Greek mythology rose and set. 
But not only was the fact acknowledged of a law in the 
nature of man resisting the law of God, — and whatever is 
placed in active and direct oppugnancy to the good is, ipso 
facto, positive evil, — it was likewise an acknowledged 
mystery, and one which, by the nature of the subject, ever 
must remain such, — a problem of which any other solu- 
tion than the statement of the fact itself was demonstrably 
impossible. It follows necessarily from the postulate of a 

16 



242 Essays of To- Day. 



responsible will. Refuse to grant this, and I have not a 
word to say. Concede this, and you concede all. For this 
is the essential attribute of a will, and contained in the very 
idea, that whatever determines the will, acquires this power 
from a previous determination of the will itself. The will 
is ultimately self-determined, or it is no longer a will under 
the law of perfect freedom, but a nature under the mechan- 
ism of cause and effect. And if by an act, to which it had 
determined itself, it has subjected itself to the determina- 
tion of nature, — in the language of St. Paul, ' to the law 
of the flesh,' — it receives a nature into itself, and so far it 
becomes a nature; and this is a corruption of the will, and 
a corrupt nature. It is also a fall of man, inasmuch as his 
will is the condition of his personality, the ground and con- 
dition of the attribute which constitutes him man. And 
the groundwork of personal being is a capacity of acknowl- 
edging the moral law, — the law of the spirit, the law of 
freedom, the divine will, — as that which should, of itself, 
suffice to determine the will to a free obedience of the law, 
the law working therein by its own exceeding lawfulness. 
This and this alone is positive good ; good of itself and 
independent of all relations. Whatever resists, and, as a 
positive force, opposes this in the will, is therefore evil. 
But an evil in the will is an evil will ; and, as all moral evil 
(that is, all that is evil without reference to its contingent 
physical consequences) is of the will, this evil will must 
have its source in the will And thus w^e might go back 
from act to act, from evil to evil, ad infinittim, without ad- 
vancing a step. We call an individual a bad man, not be- 
cause an action is contrary to the law, but because it has 



Original Sin. 243 



led us to conclude from it some principle opposed to the 
law, some private maxim or by-law in the will contrary to 
the universal law of right reason in the conscience, as the 
ground of the action. But this evil principle again must 
be grounded in some other principle, which has been made 
determinant of the will by the will's own self-determina- 
tion. For if not, it must have its ground in some necessity 
of nature; in some instinct or propensity imposed, not 
acquired, — another's work, not our own. Consequently, 
neither act nor principle could be imputed ; and, rela- 
tively to the agent, not original, not sin." 

His argument he thus sums up : " Now, let the grounds 
on which the fact of an evil, inherent in the will, is affirma- 
ble in the instance of any one man, be supposed equally 
applicable in every instance, and concerning all men, — so 
that the fact is asserted of the individual, not because he 
has committed this or that crime, or because he has shown 
himself to be this or that man, but simply because he 
is a man. Let the evil be supposed such, as to imply 
the impossibility of an individual's referring to any par- 
ticular time at which it might be conceived to have com- 
menced, or to any period of his existence at which it 
was not existing. Let it be supposed, in short, that the 
subject stands in no relation whatever to time, can neither 
be called in time nor out of time ; but that all relations 
of time are as alien and heterogeneous in this question 
as the relations and attributes of space (north, south, or 
round or square, thick or thin) are to our affections and 
moral feelings. Let the reader suppose this, and he will 
have before him the precise import of the Scriptural doc- 



244 Essays of To- Day. 



trine of Original Sin, or rather of the fact acknowledged 
in all ages, and recognized but not originating in the 
Christian Scriptures. A moral evil, then, is an evil that 
has its origin in the will. An evil common to all must 
have a common ground to all. Now, this evil ground can- 
not originate in the Divine will ; it must, therefore, be 
referred to the will of man. And this evil ground we call 
original sin. It is a mystery, — that is, a fact which we 
see but cannot explain ; and the doctrine a truth which we 
apprehend, but can neither comprehend nor communicate. 
And such by the quality of the subject (namely, a responsi- 
ble will) it must be, if it be truth at all." 

I have thus endeavored to glean from Coleridge's argu- 
ment his explanation of the reality of the sinfulness of 
original sin, as opposed to those theories which necessitate 
either the abandonment of the term " sin " and the substi- 
tution of the word *' calamity," or the degradation of God's 
character by a low anthropomorphitic terminology, — as 
when the Almighty God and Father is represented in lan- 
guage fit only for a Homeric description of Olympian 
Jove, as being "exasperated" with the unfortunate sons 
of the first man Adam. 

Let us now briefly review Dr. Julius Muller's hypothesis, 
which appears in the concluding chapters of his extensive 
exposition of the Christian doctrine of Sin. Let us make 
but one note on a peculiarity of his phraseology, and then 
briefly state his theory of the sinfulness of original sin. 
Miiller speaks a great deal of "selfishhood " and "selfhood ;" 
by which, in the former case, he means sinful self as the 
centre of our being ; by selfhood, he means the proper self, 



Original Siji. 245 



or self with a renewed will, — self plus Christ, as it were. 
*' Had the will never rebelled against the will of God, the 
bodily nature, although physical and earthly {^vx'^'^V^ %o^/^^0» 
would never have lost the harmony contained in its notion, 
but would have preserved it until the time of its glorifica- 
tion and exaltation to a higher sphere. . . . Man, by a di- 
vine order, which is itself a means of grace, inasmuch as it 
presents to him in a fallen condition the condition of his 
self-restoration, is introduced into the narrow path of his 
earthly development, and placed under the law. As, on 
the one hand, the pure innocence of his nature-basis — 
which as yet knows nothing of any disorder of the powers 
— makes obedience easy to him, so, on the other hand, 
within him a divine bias, and the impulse of conscience, 
allure him to subordination to the order of God. He must 
in any case become conscious of his own self-variance, by 
the vacillating struggle between contradictory powers ; but 
in this struggle he is able to be victorious, and, by con- 
tinued exercise in humble obedience towards the command 
of God, gradually heal his own hurt." He then makes the 
power of selfishhood, over primitive innocent selfhood, to 
account for Adam's act of yielding to the serpent. His 
theory, greatly condensed, is the following : " The first 
Adam might have become to his posterity, if they had re- 
ceived from him a sensational nature, free from disturb- 
ance, and an example of faithful obedience toward the 
divine command, that, in a limited measure, which the 
second Adam has really become in the highest sense, — 
namely, the beginner of a development liberating the will 
from its original self-variance. But he could never become 



246 Essays of To-Day. 



that, without having proved in temptation this obedience 
to the Divine will, and therefore with the victory of the 
same over the selfish tendencies of his own will. Now, 
an element of temptation was already there for our first 
parents, in the presence of a positive law, especially inas- 
much as it met them in the form of a prohibition. Cer- 
tainly, the Divine prohibition, in itself, was much rather a 
temptation to good, an excitant to the conscious subordina- 
tion of their own will to the will of God ; still, it must at 
the same time arouse the as yet slumbering tendency of 
selfhood to its emancipation from the will of God, and 
bring it to their consciousness, in order that it may be 
overcome. But as excitant to evil, as that which might 
urge the first parents to a self-decision of principles, the 
temptation could only come to them from a being in which 
evil was already present, and which saw, through the true 
nature of their sinless condition, the hidden variance be- 
tween their judicial consti*tution and the brokenness of 
their will." He then argues upon the disputed question as 
to whether the original sin in all men — the evil innate dis- 
position, the true inherited sin — is equal or unequal; and 
brings forward his peculiarly original view of the real sin 
of original sin as beyond the limits of time and space. 

We have seen that Justin Martyr and Origen accounted 
for original sin on a pre-existent theory ; namely, that we 
had each one of us sinned in a former period and in another 
world, and consequently our acts of original sin were orig- 
inal, —had their origin there and then. This was a theory 
inclusive of both the elements time and space. Coleridge's 
hypothesis does away with the conditions of time and 



Original Sin. 247 



space. Humanity is looked at as a surging mass of pres- 
ent acting wills : there is no first or last ; we are considered 
from the standpoint of God's eternal now ; and in this light 
our wills originate our every act, both good and bad. The 
actual good is from the originant good, and the actual bad 
is from the originant bad ; each set of impulses, good and 
bad, determining the action of the will with as much regu- 
larity and precision as the alternating valves in a hydraulic 
ram, or with the flashing rapidity of the valvular action of 
the steam-chest and the eccentric rod in a locomotive, rush- 
ing on, with its express train behind it. 

But Muller's theory is different from either of these. 
With regard to the question of the origin of the soul, it 
seems to be a combination of one part Creationism, two 
parts Pre-existence, and three parts Traducianism. It is a 
sort of nebular hypothesis of the soul, which many people 
simply label *' German Rationalism," and then put it away, 
back on the theological shelf, among the relics and speci- 
mens of free-thinking, where, among the other curiosities 
and in company with its neglected neighbors, it invites the 
dust of a lifetime to settle down upon it, and cover it from 
sight, and make it a dirty, disagreeable thing to touch. Let 
us, however, look at it, as the concluding theory of original 
sin. 

In his chapter, in the second volume, on the Enhance- 
ment of Sin in the development of the Individual, he re- 
marks : '* This timeless original act, in which every human 
will determines itself, generates a persistent quality of con- 
stitution, a moral condition : it is that in which we all are 
born. At first, present only as a hidden potency, it be- 



248 Essays of To-Bay. 



comes actual, with the awakening of the moral conscious- 
ness. Of all the sinful acts within our life in time, there 
can be none which possesses an equal power of forming a 
condition ; but they may very well in a less degree share 
in this determining power. The freedom is not an absurd 
ability of the will to burden itself with the most detestable 
sins, and after their commission to return back into its 
former indeterminateness with respect to these sins ; but 
the self-determining of the will becomes immediately a 
being determined ; the will gives itself a tendency to the 
sins which it once allows ; the element of lust, contained 
in every sin, becomes, as a motive of the will, a constant 
factor of the inner life, — so that, when the same excitants, 
by means of circumstances, return, the will, quite of itself, 
inclines to the same sin. Every kind of sin opens up in 
itself, in that it generates the passion, a fearful depth, 
which the sinner constantly strives by new sins to fill up ; 
but the ground of the same he is never able to find. . . . 
If this disturbing element has once entered into existence, 
it must then unfold its nature with a certain completeness, 
because only so can it be thoroughly cancelled. As the 
heavy vapors which, arising from the earth, fill the air, are 
drawn together by the powerful rays of the sun into thun- 
der-clouds, in order that, falling as rain, they may restore 
to the atmosphere its purity, — so must sin obtain a definite 
form in the life of man, in order that it may be properly 
striven with, and this strife be carried on, and conducted 
to the goal of a vigorous decision, which shall then be 
perpetual ; which indeed is not possible to man left to 
himself, but only through the redemption of Christ." 



Original Sin, 249 



The opposition which Miiller's hypothesis received from 
his fellow-theologians in Germany drew from him the fol- 
lowing explanation : " The reduction of the peccattnn orig- 
inale, to a fall preceding in a timeless manner the temporal 
life of all men, has received such animated opposition, that 
I feel myself urged to make a few remarks definitely to 
denote the real state of the case. The romantic wish is 
foreign to me, of giving solutions of this great enigma of 
our existence, which involve us in new enigmas. If any 
one is able to furnish an easier and more self-commending 
explanation, — an explanation which regards man as a being 
existing solely in time, and within the bounds of time 
makes his culpability intelligible to us, — he will find me 
very receptive for his instructions. But the explanation 
must be such an one which does not lose the very thing it 
is said to explain. The matter here is, on the one side, 
the universality of sin in the human race, its being inrooted 
in the nature of the genus ; on the other side, personal 
guilt and responsibility, the origin of sin from the arbitrary 
self-perversion of the creature, not from a necessity, — 
whether it be one freely ordained by the Divine Intelli- 
gence, or a necessity which is given for God himself. . . . 
No room should be given in these times to those opinions 
which dissolve the moral responsibihty of man, and, indeed, 
more determinately of each individual man, to the specula- 
tive or unspeculative deterministic theories which make 
excuse for man on account of sin. The reasons from this 
point of view, which necessitate me to seek the origin of our 
genus-sin in an intelligible perversion of the free will, I 
have thus endeavored to exhibit. They are chiefly contained 



250 Essays of To- Day. 



in the above-mentioned double pair of facts, of our moral 
being and consciousness, which are directly contradictory 
of each other. Now, whatever deficiency may attach to 
this explanation, however little it may be able to determine 
every thing undetermined in that transcendent pre-suppo- 
sition of our temporal existence, and to answer all ques- 
tions, — I cannot give it up, so long as it is not shown that 
those facts may also be firmly maintained by another ex- 
planation. On the contrary, if other theories inevitably 
lead to the denial of those facts, I can only look upon them 
as indirectly confirming the attempted explanation which 
has here been exhibited." Mliller then reviews Rothe's 
and Dorner's objections. Dorner finds in the natural 
condition of man no real guilt, no sin, which makes him 
damnable before God, but only preliminary sins, just for 
this reason, — because to him the conditions of that personal 
self-decision are first of all given, when one finds himself 
over against Christ ; because, in his view, until then the 
individual is entirely inwoven in the race. " I, on the 
contrary," continues Mliller, " am not able to think so in- 
significantly of man, even apart from redemption and his 
contact with it, but am obliged to consider his sin as real 
guilt, damnable guilt. x\nd it is just this which neces- 
sitates me, by virtue of that axiom common to us both, 
to seek behind the apparent unfree inwovenness of the 
individual being, in the sin and guilt of the genus, a back- 
ground of free self-decision. It is also to me a precious 
truth that, by virtue of the decree revealed in the gos- 
pel, of the Divine Love to redeem man by Jesus Christ, 
now no man is to perish on account of the sin of his nat- 



Original Sin. 251 



ural condition, unless that he appropriates it to himself 
afresh by the rejection of the gospel of Christ. But this, 
indeed, cannot be interpreted to mean that there attaches 
to the sin of the natural condition (simply to the sin itself) 
no real guilt ; but it follows from the universality of the 
Divine will of grace, and from the universal validity of 
the work of redemption. These do not, indeed, cancel im- 
mediately the guilt of the old sin, but in such a cancelling 
man must do his part by the exercise of his appropriating 
of faith ; but, because they cannot be accepted, otherwise 
than in the most holy seriousness, they insure that this 
appropriation shall be made possible to every man, by the 
presentation of the gospel of Christ." Speaking of the 
problem of moral evil as the hard rock on which so many 
make shipwreck, he thus concludes his great work on Sin : 
" Religion has essentially a side in it, according to which it 
is theory ; but in its deepest principle it is practice, the 
inmost act of the spirit. And directly here, over against 
the evil, where it alone is able to solve the otherwise insol- 
vable variance of our existence, is the point in which also 
the variance of philosophy with it must resolve itself in a 
sincere and during reconciliation. There is one among 
mankind who is absolutely free from evil, and who com- 
municates his freedom to all who become one with him by 
the act of justifying faith. But still they have this faith 
only in him, not in themselves ; still, their being-in-him 
has not equally become a perfect-being-in-self; still, their 
selfhood is not fully purified and sublimed : therefore every 
procedure of the consciousness to be one with him, is always 
conditioned by a new abandoning o£ self. It is the signiii- 



252 Essays of To- Day. 



cancy of Christian hope, that one day all which they have 
in him, they will at the same time perfectly have in them- 
selves. Then the individual, interrupted accords, which we 
are here only able listeningly to catch of the divine order 
of the world, will unite themselves in a full symphonious 
chorus, in which every discord will have been absolutely 
overcome." 

Such are the three theories which have been introduced, 
in order to explain the doctrine of Original Sin. 

The teaching of the Article is clearly defined. Anselm's 
view, as so clearly explained by Dr. Shedd, is the same ; 
namely, that of the propagation of a fallen, sinful nature. 
Coleridge's view is one which does away with the condi- 
tions of time and space ; one in which the individual wills 
of the human race are looked at on a common ground, 
which, inasmuch as it is an evil as well as a tmivei^sal 
ground, — since moral evil is an evil that has its origin in 
the will, — we call original sin. Miiller's hypothesis, strange 
as it is, seems to be simply an attempt to explain God's 
dealings with man as being perfectly in harmony with our 
human ideas of right, — that element of our moral nature 
which allies us to God. But since, according to our human 
right and the voice of conscience, it would be manifestly 
wrong to damn unnumbered millions for the misfortune of 
being born into a world of sin, there must be substituted, 
as a cause of this condemnation, lying back of this life, a 
'' peccatinn originale',' which is really and truly of the nature 
of personal sin. 

And in truth we must ultimately adopt this view, or some 
such explanatory view like it ; or, on the other hand, we 



Origi)ial Sin. 253 



must adopt that of Abelard. We are thrown upon the 
horns of a dilemma ; for, either we must have done some- 
thing actually to deserve God's judgment ; we must have 
something more, to make us objects of condemnation, than 
the mere misfortune of an inherited evil nature, as Miiller 
shows, if man's moral nature is from God, and the voice of 
conscience is the weather-vane of right, — or else, as Abe- 
lard says, we must believe that whatever God does is right : 
He can invert the principles of right and wrong, and He 
will still be just; for, according to his dictum, we deserve 
to be damned on any hypothesis, if God declares that to be 
right. 

Thus Muller's view seems to be an attempt to forestall 
human judgment, by showing that for every thing there is 
a cause, and thus some cause — a specific actual cause — 
for the culpability of original sin, lying within the range of 
human justice; a cause which can be scanned by the ex- 
perienced eye of the theological expert. 



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little which he has never known." — Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

IV. 

^HE EVACUATION OF BOSTON, with a Chronicle 
of the Siege. By George E. Ellis, LL.D. With steel 
engravings, full-page \i.tX\Q\rj^^ foe- similes, maps, &c. I vol. 
imperial 8vo. $3-oo. 

A monument of historical research and industry, worthy of the reputation 
of its distinguished author. It should be in every American library, small or 
large. Only a few copies now remain. 




FINELY PRINTED IN ECCLESIASTICAL STYLE. 



T OVING WORDS FOR 
LONELY HOURS. First 
Series. Oblong size. Price 50 
cents. Sixth thousand. 

T OVING WORDS FOR 
LONELY HOURS. Sec- 
ond Series. Second thousand. 
Oblong size. Price 50 cents. 



T ET NOT YOUR HEART 
BE TROUBLED." Small 



75 cents^ 



quarto size. Price 
Third thousand. 



'pHE OLD, OLD STORY. 

Illustrated. Red-line edition. 

Small quarto size. Price 25 cents. 

The most complete edition issued of 
this justly celebrated poem. It contains 
the no less celebrated answers, "The 
Story Told" and "The Story Used." 



VI. 

,^,g>^A)OSSES. Poems by M. F. Bridgman. i vol. i2mo. 

Cloth, bevelled edges. Price ^1.50. 



A dainty collection of charming fancies from the mature mind of a physi- 
cian, a poet, and a thinker. 




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